28TH STREET

By Priscilla Lister — SDUN Columnist

Stretching from North Park to South Park along the eastern edge of Balboa Park, 28th Street offers a splendid look at some historic Craftsman homes, sprinkled with a few Spanish eclectic and other architectural designs.

There’s a bonus on this historic neighborhood walk: a short connecting pathway through an open space preserve area that skirts the eastern edge of the Balboa Park Golf Course.

You’ll find both architecture and nature on this stroll with some pleasant surprises thrown in along the way.

Start near the intersection of Upas and 28th streets, where two Craftsman-style pillars mark an entry, declaring “Welcome to North Park, an Historic Craftsman Neighborhood.” This small public art space blocks traffic from going through 28th Street, creating a quiet area to the north.

Head north on 28th from those pillars where you’ll find several homes built by David Owen Dryden, a builder in the Craftsman style who created more than 50 bungalows in this North Park neighborhood between 1911 and 1919.

Also named a master builder in the North Park Dryden Historical District is Edward Bryans. Both Dryden and Bryans are included on a plaque by the pillars.

Born in Minnesota, Bryans came to San Diego in 1912 and built more than 150 homes and apartment buildings by 1922, including more than 22 apartment buildings along Park Boulevard in the 1920s. He also built the homes at 2829 and 3648 28th Street.

Dryden, born in Oregon in 1877, moved with his oldest sister to Los Angeles County in the mid-1890s and became a carpenter in Monrovia. He and his wife, Isabel Rockwood of the William Judson Rockwood family of artists and craftsmen, moved to San Diego in 1911.

While Monrovia’s home-building industry was slowing at that time, it was booming in San Diego because of the Panama-California International Exposition in Balboa Park.

Dryden’s Craftsman-style structures make “their neighborhoods significant examples of suburban communities in the era of the first World War,” Donald Covington writes in The Journal of San Diego History’s Winter 1991 issue. “As such, they typify the American Arts and Crafts movement.”

Covington notes that a “Craftsman house expresses the close relationship between the earth and the shelter by use of natural materials as well as through the use of a low-pitched roof with deep overhang. The frame is exposed as much as possible with the heavy wooden beams and smaller rafters in full view, extending beyond the eave, while the body of the house is sheathed in redwood shingles or stream-washed boulders.”

You’ll especially want to look for Dryden’s pagoda-style Craftsman at 3553 28th Street, the corner of 28th and Capps. Its “oriental-upturned roof structure and heavily bracketed veranda columns add much to the exotic picturesque qualities of the house,” Covington writes.

This house was the first one Dryden built on 28th Street. Its original owners were George and Anna Carr. George Carr was a manufacturer and supplier of fine doors, mill work and art glass.

Their house was completed in 1915 for $6,550.

Dryden built his own home also in 1915 at 3536 28th. He also built a classic redwood board-and-shingle Craftsman in 1916 at 3446 28th, now honored with a historic plaque naming it for its original owner, the John Carman Thurston House. Thurston was a retired Chicago manufacturer whose yard outside that house included citrus and fruit orchards, according to Covington.

Another Dryden home, now called the Kline/Dryden House, is located at 3505 28th.

Turn back and pass those pillars at Upas to continue south on 28th Street. Several historic homes here are adorned with plaques that give the names of their original owners and the years they were built.

At 3303 28th, enjoy the two mascots for the King Family Lion House, built in 1920: flanking sculptural lion guards named Scotty and Max.

The Sam and Mary McPherson/Hurlburt and Tifal House, 3133 28th, built in 1925, is a smaller Spanish-style bungalow with red-tiled roof and ornamental fountain at its side.

Notice the beautiful tile work at the red-tiled roof Spanish home at 3103 28th, the William R. and Julia Beers House, built in 1928.

The Paul E. Stake/George W. Schilling House at 3037 28th was built in 1935 and is a surprisingly modern, streamlined building.

The Emerson/Hurlburt and Tifal House at 2645 28th, built in 1924, is a splendid pink stucco Spanish eclectic gem.

The Josephine Shields House, built in 1923, at 2639 28th, features more of the flat-roofed Prairie style of architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright made so popular.

Walk all the way until 28th Street ends at Maple. Now you can begin the nature portion of this meander.

Take the path into the Switzer Canyon Open Space, but don’t actually enter Switzer Canyon to the east. Just walk straight ahead here, as if you were continuing on 28th. You’ll walk under a splendid oak woodland canopy and then through groves of giant eucalyptus, all along the eastern edge of the Balboa Park Golf Course.

Eventually you’ll reenter the land of sidewalks and 28th Street at Grape Street Park, now an off-leash dog park. You can either walk back north along Granada or 29th Street, a block or two blocks, respectively, east of 28th, where more historic homes reside.

Or retrace your steps back through the verdant green space and 28th Street again.

For another bonus, walk along the west side of 28th Street on your way back, north from Maple. As you near Upas, you’ll be fronting the eastern edge of Balboa Park’s Morley Field area. A meandering sidewalk here is etched with the names of dozens of “San Diego Perching Birds,” like the black-headed grosbeak, the Western kingbird and the Violet-Green swallow.

You may even get a glimpse of the Coronado Bridge and downtown’s skyline from this vantage point.

There’s a lot to enjoy on 28th Street.