Residents try to bring soul back to Little Italy
The San Diego Union - Tribune; San Diego, Calif.; Mar 26, 2000; Roger M. Showley

Little Italy, San Diego's tiny but colorful downtown Italian neighborhood, is going through its biggest upheaval in 40 years. It's not like the last one, when Caltrans bulldozed dozens of homes and businesses to make room for Interstate 5 from the S-curve north toward Old Town.

The current flurry of activity along India Street, Little Italy's main drag, represents a welcome rush by developers to build the first significant new housing the 205-acre community has seen in generations.

"I see this place really exploding," said Julius Zolezzi, whose family has owned property in Little Italy since the 1920s. A resident of Point Loma since the freeway construction forced him out in the late 1950s, Zolezzi said he and other Italian-Americans want to help return Little Italy to prosperity and popularity. "I don't care if some guy gives me $500 per square foot, he can go shove it," Zolezzi said. "We're not selling our property. We will make this a unique, Italian neighborhood."

Little Italy is a section of the much larger and older Middletown subdivision that was created in 1850 just as California was entering the Union. When plans were dashed to develop "New Town," the 160-acre subdivision west of Front Street, Middletown also languished. After the Civil War, development finally pushed toward the bayfront, but to the south of Little Italy. It wasn't until the 1880s, with the arrival of the railroad, that significant construction began to take place in the area. Italians began moving into Middletown around the turn of the century, drawn by the nearby canneries and fishing fleet. They built a church, opened shops and restaurants and enjoyed la dolce vita for the next 50 years.

In the 1930s and '40s, city planners envisioned creating a bay-to- park mall along Cedar Street, lined with civic and cultural buildings and terminating at the newly opened County Administration Center on Pacific Highway. But the voters said no, civic buildings were scattered about the county and Little Italy was sacrificed to the road builders and forgotten. Still, Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church continued serving its Italian-American parishioners, no matter where they lived. Italian restaurateurs, bakers and butchers kept their businesses going, appealing to Americans' pasta-loving palate. And when downtown redevelopment began creeping outward from Horton Plaza in the 1980s, Little Italians expected that their time might come. Officially, it did, when the area was brought into the downtown redevelopment zone in 1992.

Marco Li Mandri, born in Little Italy and, like Zolezzi, forced to move by the freeway, has returned to run the Little Italy Association and get the community back on its feet.

"When people started seeing the vision we had and what a great group of business owners there were, it attracted capital unlike any marketing scheme ever had," Li Mandri said. Li Mandri scoffs at other downtown redevelopment efforts as so much "scrape and bake": Blocks are leveled and new buildings are erected, but the historic heritage evaporates in the process. "We like multiple developments," he said. "We don't want monolithic developments."

Slowed by the early-1990s recession, Little Italy's renaissance is well under way with 12 residential projects under construction or planned to break ground shortly. Perhaps the most intriguing is The Waterfront, a 42-apartment project going up and around the historic Waterfront bar on Kettner Boulevard at Hawthorn Street. It involves both new construction and adaptive reuse of existing warehouses. Rents are expected to range from $1,000 to $3,000 when it opens at midyear. Architect-developer Jonathan Segal said he purposely retained the bar -- built in 1927 as a roofing establishment -- to maintain neighborhood character.

"I'm not interested in what I call `urban removal,' " Segal said. "I'm interested in harmonizing with what's existing." But Segal, who is active in nearly a dozen small-scale housing projects downtown, said his days of building apartments may be numbered. "The (land) prices are so far out of sight that I don't think I can continue building apartments," he said. "The `condo boys' are in town."

Keith Fernandez, president of Intracorp Development's San Diego office, is one of those newcomers. He called Little Italy "unproven" as a housing market and less desirable than the Marina area south of Broadway. That's where another Intracorp project is attracting buyers who like the idea of being able to walk to Horton Plaza, the Ralphs supermarket and Gaslamp Quarter nightspots. Still, Intracorp is testing the Little Italy condo market with its 88-unit Porto Siena at India and Cedar. The company sees its potential buyers as urban lovers, not necessarily those who play bocce ball, eat biscotti and buy Botticelli prints to hang on the wall. "There's a little bit (of charm) there but I wouldn't base our whole marketing program on that," he said.

You want Italian? Try architect Fabrizio Sferra and developer Alfredo Gallone, immigrants, respectively, from Rome and Naples. They've demolished a historic but dilapidated Victorian house at Union and Cedar and are replacing it with a seven-unit condo building, complete with the old house's facade tacked back on. Prices will range from about $200,000 to $300,000 on the 1,000-1,500- square-foot units. "I wanted to do an Italian-style development, taking advantage of the fact that it was in Little Italy," Gallone said. But when he moved here nearly 20 years ago, he could not acquire enough land and downtown revitalization did not occur as fast as he expected. "It's happening now," he said. "Better late than never."

It doesn't take an Italian heritage to get excited about building in Little Italy. The Olson Co., headed by Sherm Harmer, a veteran of San Diego's suburban housing development scene, chose a block at India and Beech on which to build Village Walk, an experiment in urban living. The 72-unit condo project is designed to fit into the community and make it easy for residents to access the street and participate in the Little Italy street life. Harmer's enthusiasm is apparently catching. More than 700 people placed their names on a buyer's interest list and they will soon be asked to plunk down $5,000 deposits if they still want to live in 1,500-square-foot flats averaging about $350,000 each.

"It's been a wonderful experience for us," said spokesman Gary Driver, adding that Olson plans a 100-unit project up the street.

[Illustration]
1 PIC; Caption: Housing bar none: The Waterfront bar in Little Italy is getting some new neighbors -- 42 apartments being built up and around the historic watering hole on Kettner Boulevard. Completion is expected at midyear.; Credit: EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune
Credit: STAFF WRITER