14 acres of reclaimed San Diego Bay tidelands hold the shops and piers in front of you now. Before this development, the land here was a mix of railroad yards, industrial facilities, and the bay's natural edge — the entire downtown waterfront had been heavily industrialized through the wartime years. Seaport Village was one of the first projects in a broader effort to reclaim the downtown waterfront for public and commercial use, a movement that also produced the Convention Center, Petco Park, and the park system along the Embarcadero.
The complex is built around a working 1895 Broadway Flying Horses carousel — one of the oldest carousels still operating in the United States — that was relocated here from Coney Island in 1980. The carousel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Around it, boutique shops and waterfront restaurants occupy Victorian-style buildings designed to evoke the city's late-nineteenth-century commercial architecture.
Seaport Village has become an emblem of a certain era of American downtown revitalization: festive, nautical, tourist-oriented, and slightly artificial — a theme park version of the working waterfront it replaced.