October is American Archives Month, and if you think there is nothing in it for you, time to make room in your mental storage facility for the stuff your San Diego life is made of.
Launched in 2006 by the Society of American Archivists, the monthlong celebration is dedicated to raising awareness of the people and places that preserve and catalog our history. On the local front, these people include San Diego City Clerk Elizabeth Maland and her staff, who are honoring American Archives Month by giving you the chance to explore San Diego through the things the city has squirreled away.
The good, the rad and the nutty.
“Oh my gosh, we have such a wide variety. There are quite a number of things to see,” Maland said of the books, maps, photographs and other treasures stored in the City Clerk’s vast archives in the basement of the City istration Building in downtown San Diego.
“People really need to come down. This is your stuff. This is your city.”
After taking a two-year pandemic hiatus, the Office of the City Clerk’s “Archives Month” celebration is back with rare public tours of the archives, along with a lecture series and exhibit highlighting San Diego life during the Roaring 20s.
The tours will be offered every Friday at 2 p.m. through Oct. 28 at City Clerk’s office in the downtown istration building, where you can also check out the “Roaring San Diego” exhibit in the lobby.
The lectures by local historians and other experts, including “Eating Local in the Roaring Twenties” on Oct. 18 and “A Bridge Back: LGBT History Found in the Roaring Twenties” on Oct. 24, will be held throughout the month at downtown’s Central Library.
All events are free and open to the public. Attendance is limited to 25 people for the tours and 35 people for the lectures, and advance registration is required.
The City Archives Center is in charge of identifying, preserving and storing records that capture our history as reflected in the business of being San Diego. That means official documents like census reports from the 1800s and handwritten property records.
And since the archives are also the official home of the Mayoral Artifacts collection, history is captured in the gifts, plaques and souvenir mugs that have been bestowed upon San Diego’s many mayors.
“The coolest thing we have are the mayoral artifacts. People don’t realize that’s a thing,” said archives supervisor Anne Miggins.
During a phone interview from the basement, Maland and Miggins gave a brief but impressive inventory of the some of the items that were gifts to our mayors but are the property of the city. An elephant figurine made of Pakistani green onyx. A wooden wall hanging from Russia embroidered in gold thread. A brass key to the City of Tijuana awarded to former Mayor Maureen O’Connor in 1987. A framed needlework depicting life on a Vietnamese river given to then-Mayor Jerry Sanders in 2011.
If you can’t make it to an in-person tour, you can revel in San Diego’s historical bounty from the comfort of your computer. Thanks to the City Clerk’s digital archives, everything from Sanders’ Fender Stratocaster (Gifted to him in 2006 by the Hard Rock Hotel and autographed by of Hoobastank) to saloon-related communiques from 1900 is there for the browsing.
There are burial records from Mount Hope Cemetery going back to 1868. There is a 1931 petition objecting to an odiferous Fifth Avenue concession exhibiting “embalmed specimens of Sea Animals.” There is an 88-page “Master Plan Recommendations for Mission Bay Park” from 1969, which highlights this perennial pickle: “The demand for outdoor recreation areas and facilities in California is far greater than the present supply.”
And there is the glorious rabbit hole that is the archives’ Historical Photo Gallery, where you can ogle Herve Friend’s photo of a sailing ship cruising by Point Loma in 1887, feast your flashback eyes on the Cubby Hole Restaurant in Ocean Beach (looking shabbily chic in 1958), or hang with the masses attending the 1981 Rolling Stones’ concert at the long-gone Jack Murphy Stadium.
It’s all over the map, and like everything else in archives, it’s all us.
“It’s like a little museum down there,” Maland said. “It’s a working history of San Diego, and it’s fascinating to trace the various ups and downs, the things that were going on through time and the items that were exchanged. It’s very, very interesting.”
For information about the City of San Diego’s American Archives Month activities, go to the Archives Month website (sandiego.gov/digitalarchives/4th-annual-archives-month). For information about the City Clerk Archives, go to sandiego.gov/city-clerk/inforecords/archive. The archives are also available for individual research. Email [email protected] to make an appointment.
