Barely half a block wide in places, Mission Beach puts the Pacific Ocean on one side of you and Mission Bay on the other, and it has been San Diego's quintessential beach amusement destination since the 1920s. The anchor of this boardwalk culture is Belmont Park, which opened in July 1925 as the Mission Beach Amusement Center and has been thrilling and terrifying visitors ever since. Its centerpiece is the Giant Dipper, a wooden roller coaster built in 1925 that ranks among the finest surviving examples of classic American coaster design.
The coaster was threatened with demolition in the 1970s when the amusement park fell into disrepair, but a community preservation campaign saved it in 1990, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Mission Beach's boardwalk — technically a concrete path, but universally called the boardwalk — runs four miles from here north to Pacific Beach, and on a summer weekend it is one of the most densely populated stretches of California coastline: cyclists, skaters, joggers, tourists, and locals all sharing a narrow path above the sand. The neighborhood's year-round residents live in some of the smallest and most expensive houses in San Diego, crammed onto lots defined by the peninsula's narrow width.