1905 and the Beginning

Where to begin?  What came first the chicken or the egg?  The place to start, I suppose, is the purchase of land on a newly parceled group of properties between the shores of the Pacific Ocean and the banks of Mission Bay (known as False Bay back then, but that is another story) on top of the Point Loma Formation.  The town of Ocean Beach California had been founded in 1887, and developers wanted to expand further as the population grew following “the Great Boom” in San Diego.

John W. Rankin and his wife Emma E Rankin (Pogue) and their daughter Miss Margaret Rankin moved to San Diego from Red Oak, Montgomery, Iowa.  John was a Veteran of the Civil War, who retired as an “Ice Cream Confectioner” at age 57, moved to Ocean Beach and decided to buy a lot of land just offered for sale by “Charlie” Collier in a neighborhood he dubbed “Ocean Beach Park” on the northern end of Ocean Beach.  D.C. Collier built a new trolley line you see, and it connected the ‘remote’ town of O.B. to downtown ‘New Town’ San Diego.  Luckily for me, the house lasted longer than the trolley line did.

John and his extended relatives likely ordered a home kit to build a ‘modern’ bungalow, like those offered by the Pacific Bungalow company of Los Angeles California, or Sears.

 It took him from 1910 to 1916 to build it.  He and his 2^nd wife enjoyed an unobstructed view of modern day La Jolla’s Mount Soledad and sunsets from their living room over the Pacific Ocean.  Luckily the home was well built, because 1916-1918 saw a string of weather disasters in San Diego.  Coincidently, the First World War was being fought, and arguably destroying the world that John Rankin was familiar with.  As the house was completed, the world that it had been started in was completely changed.   Entire countries destroyed and birthed new and terrible weapons and diseases spread across the world, and new technology like home electricity and refrigeration spread.  More on that later.  Luckily for us, one invention grew in popularity: the aero plane.  In 1917 The US Army sent a photographer up in an airplane to photograph the California coastline, and captured the earliest photo I have of the house and the area:

You can see the canvas wing of the aircraft on the right hand side of the photo.  Here is a closer view of the area in the square.

One more note:  Charles Lindburg flew the “Spirit of Saint Lious” out of the Ryan Aircraft factory in the far background of the top photo, and likely it was witnessed by John and Emma.

 

My first thought when I discovered this photo was: Wow!  My house was at a dead end, and what a view they must have had.  The bay was across the street, the home you see on the bottom left was built and owned by John’s Nephew who became Ocean Beach’s first Postmaster.  That home also has a boat dock on the back of the house, and it had a fish sink in the middle of the kitchen to clean fresh catches for dinner.  I also noticed, but still wonder why there was a fence around the property already, as most homes of that time in this area did not.  I can only chalk it up to a cantankerous old man, who John must have been in his late 60s when this photo was taken.  There are trees on the Boulevard, and the sidewalks are fresh poured concrete.  There was a bit of mystery on the dark spot on the setting sun side of the house, but that got solved with the next photograph.

John didn’t leave much information behind.  I uncovered a citation here, a eulogy there.  When I pulled original trim boards off the wall during home renovation, I found his initials preserved in pencil written on the back side of the wood.  I did find one photograph of him in the early 1920s, thanks to an extended member and a stroke of fortune:

By the way, this photo solved a mystery from the aerial photo from 1917, the dark splotch on the window to the West was an Awning that has disappeared before I bought the house.

 

Here is another mystery:  When I was poking inside one of the built ins, I also found a photograph that is likely older, but there is no date, and no way to ID the people in it.  Still, I like to believe that the people in this photo may be John and Emma.

Anyhow, time went on, and the area grew.  World War 2 came and went.  Sadly, Both John and Emma died before wars end, in 1943.  Their only daughter Margaret had likely moved out of the house during the 1920s announced their deaths in the paper, but kept the house as a rental property to supplement her income as a Librarian at the Ocean Beach Library.  World War II saw another massive shift in the world, but specifically San Diego.  B-24 Liberators built at Consolidated Aircraft roared out of the production plant over the house on their path to war in the Pacific.  I cannot confirm, but I strongly suspect that the construction and use of Lindbergh field convinced Margaret to move closer to the Library and downtown Ocean Beach because of the noise of aircraft departing from modern day Lindbergh Field.  There was likely a huge increase in air traffic between 1918 and 1944 as you can read about in “Lost Airfields of Southern California”  I can guess that the modern day noise we endure from Jet Airliners was likely the ‘last straw’ for Margaret as she moved to Santa Monica Street in O.B.

Over the next seventy years, more houses grew up, the remaining lots in the area were purchased and houses built to house the returning veterans and their families.  A survivor of Pearl Harbor was listed as living in the house in a 1950s phone book.  People came and people went.  Interestingly, a pair of old ladies who claimed to have lived in the home in the 1950s visited my wife one day when I was at work, and asked to be showed around.  To this day I have never found their names, though I have tried to learn who they were and how to reach them. 

One last photo to note, this is a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map that I found at the San Diego Library online records.  It shows snapshots between 1920 and 1950 of what the area looked like as it developed.  The progress of housing and the changes in the layout of the city streets can be seen as development sets in, and zoning takes effect.  I always wondered why the builders of the Western house on my street built on such a small triangular lot, effectively blocking view of the ocean from our house in 1955.  Anyhow, it happened.

Last but not least I tried to make a side by side photograph of the oldest photo of the house and the newest photo I could find that was of a similar perspective.  This is the best I could manage with my meager photo skills:

And so that brings us to today.  What a change over 100 years.