ON June 19, 2016, the San Diego Union Tribune (
visit link) ran the following story:
"The mural that launched a cross-border bike ride
Two dozen riders take off from Caliente mural in downtown San Diego
By Sandra Dibble | 7:24 p.m. June 18, 2016
A vestige of a by-gone era, a giant yellow downtown mural painted some five decades ago beckoned San Diegans to visit Tijuana’s Caliente Racetrack. On Saturday afternoon, two dozen bicycle riders set off to do just that — travel across the border and in the process promote the mural’s preservation as an important piece of regional history.
“It’s impossible to understand San Diego without knowing Tijuana,” said Randy Van Vleck, co-leader of a cycling group called Los Cruzadores. “Let’s do what the advertisement calls for.”
And with that message, the riders took off, launching what was to be a 28-mile trip from the foot of the mural at the corner of Third Avenue and C Street to Tijuana’s Caliente Casino.
The route wound past Chicano Park in San Diego’s Barrio Logan, to Chula Vista, through San Ysidro. In Tijuana, it meandered through Colonia Libertad, crossed the Tijuana River and into the grounds of the old Agua Caliente Casino, now the campus of a public high school.
To plan the ride, Los Cruzadores joined forces with San Diego’s Save Our Heritage Organisation or SOHO. Both groups want to promote awareness of the endangered mural, painted in the 1960s on the facade of the old California Theatre, which opened in 1927 as a vaudeville and silent movie house.
Developers are seeking city permission to raze the now dilapidated nine-story structure at Fourth Avenue and C Street and replace it with a 40-story, 282-unit residential tower with shops, parking, and a fitness center.
Sloan Capital and Presidio Bay Ventures, the developers, have proposed a design replicating a part of the facade of existing building. SOHO opposes the plan, maintaining that the existing building should not be demolished but rather preserved and adapted.
On Thursday, San Diego’s Historical Resources Board is scheduled to consider whether the Caliente mural and two others on the California Theatre’s walls merit historic designation.
“All we’re asking is that whatever development is there, that they keep the building as part of the development,” said Bruce Coons, SOHO’s executive director.
“It’s one of those few historic sites that teaches you every day about history,” he said. “It transports you back to a time in San Diego’s history when we were much closer to Tijuana.”
The mural “has so much to do with my story,” said ride participant Maria Elena Valenzuela, a high school assistant principal in Watsonville who grew up on both sides of the Tijuana-San Diego border.
In December 1974, her father won $97,000 in a wager at the Caliente track, and met her mother there that same day.
Brandy Geiger, a hydrographer who recently moved to Santee, had crossed the border only once before, and saw the ride as a novelty.
“I’m always looking for an opportunity to go down there,” she said. “This is a big deal for me, just to be able to ride across the border.'”