From Save Our Heritage Organization
3500 Sports Arena Boulevard in the Midway area is well known to generations as the San Diego International Sports Arena.
This venue for sports, concerts, and other events is designated under Historic Resources Board Criteria A and B, with a period of significance of 1966-1974, and under Criterion C, architecture for the year it was built, 1966.
Under A, the building qualifies as a special element of the Midway-Pacific Highway Community and the City’s historical, social, and economic development. Constructed during the Post WWII period, it represents a time of growth throughout San Diego and the movement to expand the City’s economic ventures into new industries comparable to other major cities in the country.
The International Sports Arena was the most important catalyst in the Midway neighborhood’s transformation from WWII housing into a lively entertainment and commercial hub. It was also one of the first modern stadiums/arenas in San Diego.
Criterion B is met by the arena’s association with Robert Breitbard, a significant person in San Diego sports history. Breitbard was instrumental in acquiring the land and funding for the construction of the International Sports Arena in 1966. From 1966 to 1974, he was the owner of the San Diego Gulls, a Western Hockey League franchise and the arena’s first tenants.
Breitbard also founded the San Diego Rockets, a National Basketball Association franchise that played at the arena from 1967 to 1971.
His efforts to construct the International Sports Arena and general promotion of sports in San Diego as a member of the Greater San Diego Sports Council and founder of the San Diego Hall of Champions helped to attract major sports franchises to the city.
For Criterion C, the arena embodies and retains distinctive characteristics and integrity of the New Formalist style: monumental scale, raised platform, fins mimicking classical colonnades, strict symmetry and formality, a flat roof, and ornamental concrete.
The designation excludes the temporary storage container, the temporary office building northeast of the arena and the structures located at 3580, 3570, 3494, 3350, 3250, 3240, and 3220 Sports Arena Boulevard. Photos
The San Diego International Sports Arena, two years after it opened in 1968, and today, operating under a sponsor’s name. Postcard by Photography House, San Diego. Dexter Press
the most important catalyst in the Midway neighborhood’s transformation from WWII housing into a lively entertainment and commercial hub
Yeah, the strip clubs and massage parlors that replaced housing, great historical value.
OmG I’m SO happy they’ve saved our beloved Sports Arena!!! I’m 66yo and grew up on Point Loma so naturally the San Diego Sports Arena, which it’ll always be known to me as, is so near and dear to my heart. I remember as a kid Dad taking me to Gulls and Rockets games. RIP Dad! I remember my Aunt Betty talking me and my cousin Dick to see The Nutcracker Suite on ice. I remember me and my good ole best friend Scott Crowder begging our folks to let us go see our first concert Foghat and J Geils Band circa 1972-73? What’s funny is we were literally driven to the concert by Scotts Mom Alice in her 1970 Country Squire just like Almost Famous – same exact car even the brown color wood sides LOL! Oh I’m so happy and I want to thank anyone and everyone who worked so hard keeping those greedy land monger developers at bay, thank you thank you thank you! And even though I haven’t spoken to her in way too long and don’t know for sure but something tells me my good ole fellow local childhood pal Kathy Pearson from Sunset Cliffs was probably instrumental in everything. Thanks Kathy for always sticking up for our precision 92107 92106! Thanks to everyone mucho much! ??
The idea that affordable anything will be built is disingenuous . It is historic. Just build on the edge. Parking underneath. Remodel the interior walk ways & we have a wonderful event, sports & concert venue still!
They shouldn’t just tear it down for the historic value alone. Leaving a city with out a venue is called the whatever Midwest town I can’t remember.
The opportunity to rebuild the dated buildings & allowing for higher density is still possible.
Being snarky about strip clubs- well. All of which happened. But they are not on this property. Nice try.
Designers need to look at other options than the graphic designs I’ve seen. Pfft. Leave it be.
Truth hurts? That’s what it became with city approval after the removal of post WW2 affordable housing. Kind of ironic the city mantra of affordable housing while passing this off for political favors. Tear it down and make it all affordable housing and the disingenuous building changes can stop ruining neighborhoods.
Underground parking, LOL, there’s an 8′ sewer running through the property.
OMG it’s a piece of shit. Always has been. Teat it down ASAP. If it’s rebuilt let it be somewhere else in a part of town that can absorb the vehicular traffic. Please no more cars into that area.
Why not use a small part of the sports arena as a museum for all of San Diego’s mayors, councilmembers and professional sports teams, and use the rest of it for affordable housing and a local food bank?
It could be a thing!
Not being a ‘sports guy’ whatsoever, my only participation in any corporate sporting event in my life was buying a ticket to a Padres baseball game ONLY because the ZZ TOP concert was scheduled afterwards. BOR-ing to the extreme, and of course they lost. Badly if I remember correctly. That was the worst concert for sound I’ve ever been to but then I never went to a Sports Arena event, either, knowing how awful it was. But I thought the open end of the stadium might be better but of course they aimed the giant speakers towards the middle of the ‘U’… As a life-long musician, music events should NEVER be held inside concrete walls as the acoustics are horrible and the half-second blast-back echo distorts and destroys the music incredibly bad…
The best use that incredibly ugly concrete building called the ‘Sports Arena’ that I ever saw was the huge Swap Meet decades ago that filled the parking lot. Now that was fun to go to!
But calling it ‘Historic?’ That’s stretching the concept just a mite too far! My grasp of that term does not include an incredibly ugly piece of crap building that wallowed in corporate greed funded by tax dollars that should have been put to better use. Put the money into building a new San Diego Fishing Pier in OB!!
But the strip clubs? Historic! I remember those because I once had to stop in, my only time ever inside one, to buy a pack of cigarettes from the vending machine that was in the lobby (was still addicted to nicotine then) while coming home from a late-night skate session at the downtown concourse parking building. Anybody else remember those sessions?
Now that was a building designed for a sport! Sure left a lot of skin there, though, and broken boards. Ouch!
How about knocking the entire Arena down and turning the entire property into a beautiful park? Screw more freaking businesses and ridiculously expensive housing most people will never be able to afford. Besides, being as the area is on the fault line and in a flood plain, seems like a better plan.
sealintheSelkirks