Abstract
Chicano Park is a 7.4-acre park located in San Diego City’s Barrio Logan beneath the east-west approach ramps of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge where the bridge bisects Interstate 5. The park was created in 1970 after residents in Barrio Logan participated in a “takeover” of land that was being prepared for a substation of the California Highway Patrol. Barrio Logan the second largest barrio on the West Coast until national and state transportation and urban renewal public policies, of the 1950’s and 1960’s, relocated thousands of residents from their self-contained neighborhood to create Interstate 5, to rezone the area from residential to light industrial, and to build the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge. The decision to build a substation for the California Highway Patrol on the site the community had identified for a park became the defining moment as the residents took it upon themselves to create their own lasting landmark, Chicano Park, a barrio logo in their own style. Since April 22, 1970, the park has been utilized by the Chicano community of San Diego as a place for social and political events. Its facilities include children’s playgrounds, restrooms, a Kiosko or dance pavilion, picnic areas, multi-purpose courts, open play lawns, a raised plaza, community gardens, sculptures, fountain, and two small parking areas. The park is distinguished by murals painted on the pillars, abutments, and ramps of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge. The Chicano Park murals consist of an assemblage of multiple vibrantly colored paintings on of the concrete pillars and two abutments that support the San Diego end of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge. Forty of these murals painted on twenty-four of pillars, abutments and ramps were constructed during the height of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. These murals and their iconography depict images of Mexican pre-Columbian gods, legendary icons and myths, botanical elements, animal imagery, the Mexican colonial experience, revolutionary struggles, cultural and spiritual reaffirmation through the arts, Chicano achievements, identity and bicultural duality as symbolized in the search for the “indigenous self,” Mexican and Chicano cultural heroes and heroines and scenes based on contemporary Chicano civil rights history. Today over 100 murals decorate the pillars of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge; however, the bulk of the murals were painted in the 1970’s and 1980’s, by the major Chicano artists of California. Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park and the Chicano Park Murals appear to be eligible for the National Register under Criterion A at the local level of significance due to its critical association with the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of the City of San Diego’s political and social history. In 1997 Cherilyn Widell, California State Historic Preservation Officer concurred with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) 1996 State Historic Research Education Report for the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge that Chicano Park and the Chicano Park murals, although not yet 50 years old, meet the exceptional importance criterion for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and the California Register of Historical Resources. The San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge piers and supports that are grounded in Chicano Park are the “canvas” for the murals; the bridge must also be considered a contributing element of the Chicano Park murals.