Picture Alonzo Horton, the Connecticut-born speculator whose scrubland purchase became the San Diego you know today. In 1867, Horton paid twenty-six cents an acre for 960 acres of scrubland near the waterfront — land that became the commercial heart of the city for the next century. He built a wharf, laid out streets, and sold lots to arriving settlers, transforming what had been a quiet village clinging to the hills of Old Town into a booming American town.
Horton called it New San Diego, and the name stuck. This plaza was the ceremonial center of his vision, a public square where civic life gathered. The Horton Grand Hotel nearby is a reconstruction of two Victorian hotels Horton built in the 1880s.
In the 1980s, the plaza became the site of a famously eccentric postmodern shopping mall — pastel colors, irregular angles, no straight sightlines — that was heralded as innovative retail design before struggling commercially in the internet age. It has since been reimagined again, a pattern very much in keeping with Horton's own restless habit of tearing down and rebuilding.