San Diego

San Diego in Frame: An afternoon through Little Italy and the Waterfront

One of my absolute favorite places for a layover! San Diego doesn't need much help looking good in a photograph, but there's one stretch of the city — from the tall ships on North Harbor Drive to the colorful blocks of Little Italy — that keeps pulling me back with camera in hand. This set came out of a few hours of wandering with no real plan other than to follow the light and see what the neighborhood wanted to show me.

A short walk into Little Italy, where the neighborhood's personality shows up in details rather than landmarks. A firehouse engine bay. A few blocks later, a trio of kids ducked into Filippi's Pizza Grotto — "the heart of Little Italy since 1950" — proof that some things in this neighborhood haven't needed updating in seventy-five years, and shouldn't.

Little Italy's real signature, though, is color. The block of stacked, jewel-toned facades on India Street — mustard yellow, brick red, dusty plum, slate blue — is the kind of architecture that looks almost unreal until you're standing in front of it. I caught it under a hard blue sky with clouds doing exactly what clouds are supposed to do for a photographer. Nearby, a rooftop deck flew the Italian flag next to the American flag and a Padres banner, a small, unplanned still life that says more about this neighborhood's identity than any plaque could.

I ended the walk at a raw bar tucked into the neighborhood, where the chalkboard signage did some of my writing for me: "Freshly Shucked and Emotionally Unavailable" next to a scrawled list of oyster varieties — Laguna, Kumiai, Pacific Petites. It's the kind of unpretentious, funny detail that reminds you Little Italy is still a place people actually live and eat in, not just a backdrop.

Early in the evening, the Star of India was rigged out in full sail against a sky doing its best impression of a painting. She's one of the oldest active sailing ships in the world, and there's something almost unfair about how photogenic she is — masts and rigging cutting black lines across a sherbet-colored sunrise, with a stubborn city traffic light refusing to get out of the frame. I left it in. San Diego is a working city before it's a postcard, and I like when a photo admits that.

Taken together, this set is less a "best of San Diego" than a record of one good light, one good walk, and a neighborhood that keeps giving a photographer more than he came for.

Prints from this San Diego collection are available — reach out if you'd like a piece of this series for your wall.