On 8/15/2015, the online version of the San Diego Union Tribune (
visit link) ran the following story:
"Spreckels Organ: A pipe dream that’s lasted
Popular Balboa Park organ is enjoying big centennial year
By John Wilkens | 3 p.m. Aug. 15, 2015
The door goes up, the organist sits down, music gets played. It can all seem beautifully simple during concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park.
And it’s been that way for 100 years.
But what seems simple often isn’t, and when civic organist Carol Williams performs at the console Sunday afternoon, and Grammy winner Paul Jacobs follows her Monday night, they will be defying the elements, and history.
Pipe organs, once cherished darlings of American culture, housed in thousands of movie theaters and churches, are disappearing - costly to build, tricky to maintain, hard to play well. Outdoor ones, always rare, are even more so now. Fewer than a half-dozen still operate.
The one here has survived through the efforts of the nonprofit Spreckels Organ Society, city officials who have found the money even in lean times for concerts, and a succession of curators who have passed along the secrets necessary to keep a complex machine with more than 10,000 moving parts up and running.
“They’ve done a wonderful job of preserving the Spreckels,” said Michael Kinerk, a staff member with the American Theatre Organ Society, a nonprofit heritage group. “Because it’s in Balboa Park and because it’s still played so often, I can say without hesitation it’s the best known outdoor organ in the United States.”
Organ concerts
Free Spreckels Organ concerts are held every Sunday at 2 p.m. in Balboa Park. There is also an annual Summer Organ Festival on Monday nights, which runs this year through Aug. 31. Those concerts begin at 7:30 p.m.
And in this, its centennial year, it’s not just surviving but growing.
Donors have contributed more than $225,000 to add dozens of pipes to the organ, bringing new tuba and string voices to an instrument that already ranges from a whisper to a roar. They’ve also added sounds like a train whistle and a police siren, handy when the organ is used — as it will be Aug. 24 — to accompany the screening of silent movies.
Society executive director Ross Porter said the additional pipes will bring the total in the Spreckels to 5,005 and again make it the largest outdoor pipe organ in the world.
The current title holder is the “Heroes Organ” in Kufstein, Austria, built in 1931 to honor the dead from World War I. It has 4,948 pipes.
“We were the first outdoor organ and the largest until Kufstein took it away from us maybe 10 years ago,” Porter said. “To be the largest is part of our brand, and more important, to be able to add voices and make the organ better is part of this generation’s legacy.”
The city’s ‘music voice’
The idea of paying it forward is a big reason why the organ exists, and why it’s survived.
It was a gift from two brothers, John and Adolph Spreckels, heirs to a sugar fortune and major players in San Diego’s early development. They had their fingers in many civic pies: newspapers, water companies, railroads, racetracks, hotels.
When San Diego was putting on the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, pipe organs were considered technological marvels. Every fair wanted one. The Spreckels brothers paid about $100,000 for the Austin Organ Opus #453 and the pavilion that houses it, and then donated them to the city with the request that the concerts always be free."