As James Monroe Hartley surveyed the plot of land he had just purchased two words must have come to mind. The first of them was citrus.

It was during the summer of 1893 and Hartley had consummated the deal with a merchant named Joseph Nash for a tract that lay between what would eventually become Ray and 32^nd Streets, University Avenue and Dwight, an area that was due north and slightly east of City Park. It was flat land and perfect, Hartley thought, for the growing of citrus trees. Lemons were a cash cow elsewhere around the county of San Diego and Hartley wanted in on the action.

James Hartley, Jimmy to his friends, was born in Iowa. He married Mary Jane Tibbets and fathered six children. He'd come West like so many before him with dreams of cashing in on one boom or the other, in this case the land boom. He found a motivated seller in Nash, who had opened the first general store in New San Diego on State and G Streets and had been plowing his profits into the latest gold rush, which was real estate.

The second word that would-be lemon baron Hartley had to be considering on that day was this: water. By August there had been a scant four inches of rainfall and temperatures were holding in the 80s. San Diego was caught in the grips of a killing drought and Hartley’s tract was without irrigation. Water therefore had to be muled up from El Cajon Avenue (now Boulevard) by the barrelfull where there was a modest reservoir that was in turn fed by Mission Valley wells.

It was water, or the lack thereof, that soured any dreams of a big citrus paycheck. And when James Hartley died in July of 1904 there seemed only one thing left to do with Hartley’s North Park, as it was now known: develop it. The idea was a no-brainer, really. San Diego’s population was growing and the city was spreading out in all directions.

In 1905 one of Hartley’s sons, Jack, formed a real estate brokerage with brother-in-law William Stevens. By 1911 they’d poured curb and sidewalks and had paved the streets with decomposed granite and were shilling parcels for commercial and residential use. They prospered, and they dropped anchor on the corner of 30^th and University in 1912 with the area’s first high-rise: the Stevens Building, now the site of Western Dental.

30^th and University became the heart of North Park; it still is.

But it was the expansion of public transportation that made North Park into a booming township. John D. Spreckels, the wealthiest man in San Diego in his day owned the trolley line. He theorized that cities followed transportation and he was right. In 1910 a long finger of trolley tracks was extended east to North Park along University Avenue. North Park was now connected to New San Diego, Hillcrest, Golden Hill, Normal Heights, and east San Diego. But first, it took a bridge to make that happen.

The Georgia Street overpass (it spans University near Park Blvd) went up in 1907 and was later converted to the cement Art Deco structure that remains in use today. As such it is registered as a local, state, and national historic landmark, something North Park is rich in - landmarks. But first, back to 1910.

1910 was the year that park commissioners would vote to change the name of City Park to Balboa Park. The park commissioners had clout and in 1911 their collective vote on a matter changed local history. That year, they inked the deal to begin construction in the Park of the Panama California Exposition which opened in 1915. North Park would benefit greatly from the spillover generated by California’s biggest draw.

Meanwhile, there was a building boom going on in San Diego. Between 1911 and 1918 dozens of singular homes were going up in North Park. An Arts and Crafts movement builder/architect named David Owen Dreyden was responsible for what we now know as the Craftsman, California Bungalow, and Spanish Mission Revival homes along Pershing and 28^th streets and in Mission Hills and University Heights.

Many of the old homes stand preserved to this day to the extent that the neighborhood has finally been given historical designation as the North Park Dreyden District. (Other architectural chestnuts remain in North Park including but not limited to the Lafayette Hotel, the 124-foot tall water tower (now empty) that stands over the Boulevard, and the Silver Gate Masonic Temple on Utah at North Park Way. It is a stunning example of 1930’s Art Deco.)

The advent of the automobile (there was one in many of those Craftsman garages by 1907) began to eat away at streetcar profits and the transit system began a long and slow decline over time into an inglorious extinction.

The 1920s saw another boom in North Park population and a spurt in development that led to the opening of the Ramona Theater in 1922, street lighting along University Avenue in 1926, and the opening of the grand West Coast (now North Park) theater in 1928. By 1945 there was a popular roller skating rink called Palisade Gardens at 2838 University Avenue, and with the addition of a 36,000 sq. ft. JC Penny’s and a Woolworth department store, North Park became a destination shopping area through the 1950’s.

By the late 1960’s the trolley system along University Avenue was gone, but it was a larger mass-attraction that was coaxing consumers away from North Park and the even greater neon-lit splendor that was El Cajon Blvd with an almost magnetic drawing power: shopping malls, and the freeway.

North Park would slip into a depression that lasted for the next three decades.

The neighborhood would make national news in 1978 when a jetliner on approach to Lindbergh slammed into the street near Dwight and Nile streets resulting in the largest such disaster in California aviation history.

Otherwise, North Park would continue to decay until 1990 or so. The rents were cheap, the buildings were funky, and as such, the neighborhood attracted drug use, crime, and artists.

Today the crime and the druggies are long gone but the artists are still here. They’ve organized along what is now noted as one of the most culturally rich art districts in San Diego: Ray Street. For the past decade or so North Park artists have celebrated their collective existence with an open-door art walk called Ray @ Night on the second Tuesday of each month.

The North Park revival of the 90s is also notable in that the greater majority of the old architecture was preserved, this in spite of Southern California’s knock-down brown stucco strip mall culture. As a result, the eclecticism of North Park survives today but the vibe has changed along with the times.

Now, North Park is once again a county-wide draw, a destination rather than a pass-through on the way somewhere else. There are critically acclaimed eateries and night clubs, music venues, theaters, and even an old-school poetry-jazz-friendly coffee shop amidst some of the holdovers from eras past that are still doing business like they always have along the quiet streets in the heart of North Park.