TimeOut

Qualcomm/Snapdragon/Beetle

Football, baseball and concert fans — might know of the Jack Murphy or Qualcomm Stadium — the primary sports facility in San Diego for nearly 50 years. The SD Chargers, Aztecs and a variety of other teams played here.

In addition to sporting events, its massive parking lot was used for car shows, slalom racing, 4x4 truck jumping, swap meets, concerts and other diversions from daily life.

A trolley line comes through the parking lot (on the left side of the image above) for those who didn’t want to drive here.

Obligatory photo for Amanico...

Being a car nut I came to most of those events, and earlier had season tickets for the SDSU Aztec football games for many years.

After long negotiations, in 2020 or so when everyone was busy with Covid, the city sold the stadium land to San Diego State University, tore down the stadium, and a new sports facility was built.

It's now called Snapdragon (name of a Qualcomm chip) and was designed for college football and soccer (I know, I know, “real” football is whatever you want to call it).

Snapdragon is a fraction of the size of the former stadium, because we no longer have a pro football team, and because most of the land will be redeveloped as lower-income homes and/or student housing, and classrooms.

No more expansive parking, tailgate parties, slaloms, etc. They say parking will be by reservation via Ticketmaster and “competitively priced”.

We walked south (left) of the trolley tracks which was bare land when this photo was taken, and around back to the mall. A couple miles at least.

Having only seen it from a distance, we went on a beautiful sunny morning (today). Although it’s right on the San Diego River, you can’t see, hear or smell the river which is behind this fence.

There’s currently lots of grass.

It’s right behind a center that features Costco, Lowes and IKEA, as you can see. This guy was practicing Frisbee golf.

Soccer. I used to work in that building behind the players, which actually is on the other side of the river and 8 lanes of Interstate freeway 8.

Moms and kiddees on the playground.

Brutalist Trolley Station Architecture

Wildflowers in the drainage basins.

Uh, there’s water here in midsummer. No rains for a few months, but the 23-24 season total was 14.3 inches, thus well above 100-year average of 9 inches.

My local weather expert has been tracking our National Weather Service rain records back to 1875 and looking at rainfall averages by decades for 150 years, he maintains there is no long term difference in precipitation. (SEE HERE)

Good to know if you are buying near here, but we have had some valley-wide floods!

We saw lots of birds.

No Kumeyaay botanists were seen.

I’m not sure if this complex system is under or over-engineered; we shall see when the first big rainstorms come — if the whole thing ends up a mile downstream we will know the calculations were inadequate.