Grand Victorian and Craftsman homes rise around you here, built in the 1890s by bankers drawn to views of Balboa Park and the bay. At the end of Spruce Street, a few blocks west of here, hangs one of San Diego's great hidden surprises: the Spruce Street Suspension Bridge, a 375-foot-long footbridge suspended by cables over a deep canyon, built in 1912 to connect a residential development on the canyon's far side to the streetcar line. The bridge sways gently as you walk across it, and the canyon below is thick with vegetation.
It is entirely free, entirely open to the public, and entirely underknown — a remarkable piece of pedestrian infrastructure that has somehow survived more than a century without being widened, replaced, or removed. Banker's Hill also contains some of the finest Victorian and Edwardian residential architecture in San Diego, including several homes designed by Irving Gill, the Southern California architect whose career bridged the ornate nineteenth century and the stripped-down modernism that followed. Gill's clean white stucco buildings stand beside elaborate Queen Anne Victorians, a compressed architectural history of American taste.