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Community Corner

1955: Big Road Coming

News from the November, 1955 editions of the Lemon Grove Review when the heyday of the unpaved road finally bit the dust.

Before Route 94:  There was Campo Road, also known as the old stagecoach route between San Diego and Yuma, AZ.  Lemon Grove had a stagecoach stop at the large home and way station built by George Troxell in 1894 -- today, the site of The Home Depot.

From 1896 onward, as cars gained ascendancy, larger and longer roads, however unpaved, were needed.  In November, 1926 Old Highway 80 (now a historic site) was built to accommodate cross-country travel and commercial freight trucks.  Highway 80 was part of the ocean-to-ocean Highway running from Savannah to San Diego known as the "Broadway of America."

Before Old Highway 80:  There was the Dixie Overland Highway that was a segment of 80 and threaded through the Laguna Mountains to the Algodones Sand Dunes in Imperial County, where you and your Model T stopped dead in dismay.  

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To solve the shifting-sand problem, the two-track Old Plank Road was built in 1915 and instantly became the stuff of legend.  It was memorialized in the famed 1935 exposition in Balboa Park when Ford drove its new models on a replica of the bumpy Old Plank Road to show how smooth a ride you'd get in a spanking new Ford.  This gambit worked and sales soared, Great Depression or no.

The Old Plank Road was used by countless travelers, among them, architect Alberto Treganza, his wife Antwonet and their children Amorita and Adan in December, 1926.  With her parents and brother sick with influenza, it fell to 14-year-old Amorita to drive the family through the desert to Lemon Grove, where "we fell into the arms of our grandparents on Christmas Day," as our heroine later wrote in a memoir.

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But two years later, the Treganzas had bounced back.  You remember, dear readers.  Antwonet became a weekly columnist for the San Diego Union ("Walks and Talks with Mother Nature") and president of the Lemon Grove Chamber of Commerce.  Alberto's architectural practice took off--he designed The Big Lemon in 1928 and Amorita rode on it as the first Miss Lemon Grove on July 4 that year.  Adan was digging things up, heralding the Treganza Anthropology Museum he would later found at San Francisco State.

After Old Highway 80:  The late Roger Challberg, former president of the Mountain Empire Historical Society, noted the lack of grading equipment to go through mountains in the early 20th century, so Old Highway 80 "just went around them."  Sometimes the road meandered into "nowhere," causing no end of drama for mule or horse drawn wagons struggling on narrow, twisty curves.

Highway 80's fabled contortions lived on after Route 94 was built as the immortal bumper sticker, "Pray for me--I drive Highway 94."

But in late 1955, as the Lemon Grove Review showed, a big road was coming, heralding others that would ferry San Diego County residents north, south and east.   Of these, the front runner was Freeway 94, leaving San Diego, traversing straight through to Jamul, where exotic twists and turns resumed and are there to this day until the motorist eventually hooks up with Interstate 8 (completed in 1974).

94 Past Lemon Grove:  The map shown above caused excitement in Lemon Grove as residents finally understood what the California Highway Commission (today, CalTrans) had been promising for some 30 years.  There would be a cloverleaf interchange at Massachusetts Avenue (where the steep, curving off ramp is still a source of difficulty).  

There would be an undercrossing at Buena Vista, formerly an old orchard road that led up the hill to the Waite Orchard and northern Lemon Grove.  

There would be a pedestrian overcrossing at Costa Bella Drive and a pedestrian undercrossing at Quarry Road -- what a quaint idea!  

There would be an overcrossing at Grove Street--one that was hugely convenient for locals for years and lamented when it was lost to the Route 125 extension.

There would be a complex interchange with undercrossing at the junction of Campo, Spring, Imperial (now Broadway) and the new freeway.

By 1956 the portion of 94 between College Avenue and Campo Road was completed.  It displaced Cinema-Dine, the drive-in movie theater run by Ira and Jack Durham, the burial plot of the Polish Princess Filomena Sledzinski and various homes and small businesses.

The Lemon Grove portion of 94 was built by Guy Atkinson Construction Co. for $2.8 million, lower than state engineers had estimated.

Driving Force:  There were plenty of reasons for building big roads in the 1950s.  They were called cars.  They were all made in America in 1955 and folks bought millions of them.  In those prosperous years, the cars made possible the growth of suburbs--and Lemon Grove was a suburb of San Diego.

Some 2,000 homes were built in the Sweetwater-Jamacha district alone, with hundreds more constructed inside Lemon Grove.

Water tax rates rose 40 cents per $100 as improvements and subdivisions increased.

A 1955 Tax Bill:  1955 was the first year when a person's property tax was figured on a percentage of the home he/she lived in.  Here's how a 1955 tax bill in Lemon Grove broke down:

County, $2.08; Library, .07; schools, $3.37; fire, $.52; hospital, .20; water, .36; and sanitation, .46.  Total:  $7.06

The Phantom Swimming Pool:  Lemon Grove women were undeterred by taxes, freeways or traffic congestion.  They wanted a swimming pool and they were going to get it.  So they persuaded local merchants to sell tickets to the Third Annual Style Show in the Lemon Grove Junior High Cafetorium and built stuffed snowmen to herald the event (see the adorable photo).

Fortunes were not made and the swimming pool was never built -- but, as the  Fall 2013 edition of the Lemon Grove Gazette points out, you can always swim in the Mt. Miguel High School pool.

Wisdom of the Ages:  The Review's freeway and finance-related fillers were a caution:

     Many people have a magnetic personality because everything they wear is charged.

     When driving, heads you win and cocktails you lose.

     Take accordion lessons to learn how to fold the new road maps.

     To avoid being run over in the street, consider walking on the sidewalk.

And our favorite:

     Several islands in the South Pacific have no taxes or crime.  They also have no inhabitants.

And so it went in late autumn 58 years ago when The Big Lemon stood tall amid cars, dust, big roads, taxation and consumer spending, sure that the California Dream would always deliver.

   About this column:  Compiled by Helen Ofield, president of the Lemon Grove Historical Society, from newspapers archived at the H. Lee House Cultural Center.  Each week, we take a peek at the past with some news and advertising highlights from a randomly chosen edition of the Lemon Grove Review.  Ofield was awarded first place in 2013 and second place in 2012 in non-daily column writing from the Society of Professional Journalists.  In 2013 she received third place in the "History" category from the San Diego Press Club.

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