There is almost no place in South San Diego County where you cannot see Chula Vista’s new monument to civic pride and ambition.
The Gaylord Pacific Hotel and Convention Center rises like an ocean liner from the southeastern shore of San Diego Bay. Twenty-two stories high, with 1,600 rooms, a 4.25-acre water park and 477,000 square feet of meeting space, the $1.35 billion resort is visible on a clear day from downtown San Diego to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Its gleaming white facade, water-blue windows and lush tropical landscaping appear out of scale with the surrounding region, as if a Miami resort had wandered away from Biscayne Bay and somehow fetched up along Chula Vista’s once industrial shoreline.
The hotel appears like a dream because, in a very real sense, it is. Decades ago, the bayfront site now occupied by the resort was home to aerospace manufacturer Rohr Industries. Later, the hulking South Bay Power Plant blocked access to the water. The idea of tourists flocking to such an industrial wasteland would have seemed far-fetched.
And yet residents, and their leaders, dreamed of something better. Last week, they got it with the splashy opening of the Gaylord hotel and the promise of more to come as Chula Vista’s decades-in-the-making Bayfront Master Plan comes to fruition.
Last week’s ceremonial ribbon cutting at the hotel received wall-to-wall local news coverage, including an excellent preview in the Union-Tribune and a glowing segment on NBC featuring interviews with the hotel’s developer, local officials and giddy residents.
In this newsletter, I want to reflect on something easy to miss amid all the hoopla – the quieter and yet just as resonant emotional significance of this outsized new arrival on the Chula Vista shoreline.
It has taken decades of hoping, dreaming, scheming, dealing, planning and building to bring this hotel, and the larger bayfront master plan, to fruition. It’s a massive change in a region that has always resented being looked down on by glitzier parts of San Diego. What will it mean for South County to have some glitz of its own?
At last week’s ribbon cutting ceremony, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann used a phrase he repeats often these days: “This is Chula Vista’s decade,” he said.
You could dismiss those words as political bluster – especially since McCann is currently running to fill a vacant seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.
But McCann has reason to boast. While San Diego wars with itself over budget cuts and deficits, Chula Vista this evening is poised to pass its biggest budget ever that fully funds city services without raising taxes or dipping into reserves. The bayfront redevelopment, along with several other housing and hotel projects currently underway in the city, stands out at a time when coastal cities to the north bicker over state housing requirements and fight to stop major developments.
On a deeper level, the hotel’s arrival gives this proud, historically working class city a feeling that, at last, it too can have nice things people in other parts of San Diego take for granted.
“We were constantly told by the powers that be that we really shouldn’t aspire to too much,” said state Sen. Steve Padilla at the ribbon cutting ceremony, recalling regional leaders’ condescension toward Chula Vista’s bayfront plans.
A former Chula Vista Mayor and City Councilmember, Padilla was a key figure in the bayfront plan’s early stages.
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you that because you’re Chula Vista, you have to settle for anything less,” Padilla told the ribbon cutting crowd.
There was nothing “less” about last week’s opening ceremony. The lineup of local dignitaries read like a who’s who of South County politics. There was jostling for position in front of news cameras. Tailored suits and fancy dresses. Cocktail servers bearing platters of beef tartare topped by curlicue greens and Spanish risotto in what looked like miniature fishbowls.
The hotel itself appeared as a cross between supersized Southern ambition – Gaylord, a subsidiary of Marriott Hotels, is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee – and the California good life.
The largest of the complex’s convention halls holds 10,000 people. The sports bar (which also features a hidden speakeasy accessible through a freezer walkway) is dominated by a two-story screen jammed with more than a dozen sports games all playing simultaneously. The water park outside includes multiple swimming pools, a lazy river, wobbling stacks of clear plastic innertubes, curving rows of palm trees and chez lounges, and waterside bars.
Rooms look toward downtown San Diego and the Coronado Bridge – almost as if to say, ‘We see you. We’re not intimidated by you.’ Everywhere on Thursday there were hotel employees opening doors, welcoming visitors or just standing around smiling eagerly like ride operators or greeters at a Disney theme park.
City Councilmember Cesar Fernandez spoke for many in Chula Vista when he recalled what the city’s bayfront used to be: A place for sunset strolls, where couples on dates held hands and gazed across the water toward downtown San Diego’s highrises and fancy hotels.
“It’s a place where people knew something big would happen someday. And this is it,” Fernandez said in an interview a few days before the ribbon cutting ceremony.
Now, Fernandez said, would come a new challenge. “I don’t want our love for nice things to push out people who have lived here for generations,” he said. “I keep my eye on that.”
That, I think, is the deeper meaning – the promise and also the warning – of Gaylord’s arrival in South County. Much like a working class kid who studies hard, goes off to college and then returns home torn between loyalty to the neighborhood and desire for wider horizons, Chula Vista is stepping into a new chapter in its history.
I wrote about that change late last year. It was even easier to see at Thursday’s ceremony.
Before I left on Thursday, I managed to get a few minutes with Ira Mitzner, the president and CEO of RIDA Development Corporation. RIDA, headquartered in Houston, is the international real estate firm that financed and built the Gaylord project. The company’s website says it currently owns roughly $14 billion in real estate assets around the globe.
Mitzner said he was drawn to Chula Vista not just because it had one of San Diego County’s few remaining large undeveloped waterfront properties, but also because of something more intangible about the city’s culture and identity.
Mitzner said his father, David Mitzner, who founded RIDA, was a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to America in 1949 with $17 in his pocket.
“This is an immigrant community,” Mitzner said of Chula Vista. Until now, he said, the city had always been told, “You won’t get a fancy hotel. You’ll get a Holiday Inn.”
“We didn’t just see Chula Vista” when RIDA first contemplated building at the bayfront, Mitzner said. “We saw a piece of land that was spectacular and a chance to do something special.”
“It became personal for us,” he said. “I’m staying apolitical. But the immigrant spirit has contributed so much to the building of this country. We have to appreciate that. We are better when we all come together…We need to keep growing for the future.”
