THE CARLSBAD HIGHWAY
My wife worked for a few years as a claims adjuster for an insurance company in San Diego, where she’d get calls from all over Southern California. When she started working there, she was mystified by callers who said they’d been in an accident on the “101 freeway” because, for her, U.S. 101 wasn’t a freeway at all—it was Main Street for San Diego County’s northern coastal communities. Sometimes two lanes, sometimes four, it broke off from Interstate 5 and sliced its way down through the heart of Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, and Del Mar. Like State Route 1 farther north, it’s called the Coast Highway in some places, with local designations such as Carlsbad Boulevard, Camino Del Mar, and Torrey Pines Road taking over in others.
Interstate 5 bypassed this section of highway in the 1960s, just as it bypassed old U.S. 99 in the San Joaquin Valley far to the north. But unlike 99, which became a state route, 101 retained its federal designation.
It began as an even older highway that snaked its way down into San Diego over the Torrey Pines and Biological grades, winding down through La Jolla before moving back close to the current alignment north of Mission Bay. This portion of the road was bypassed in 1933 by what California’s highway department called the “Million Dollar Highway”—because it was completed for just slightly more than $1 million. (Today, the same project would cost a lot more, with inflation raising the cost to $18.5 million in 2016 dollars.)
A sign across U.S. 101 welcomes motorists to Encinitas. It’s relatively new but follows a tradition of signs that spanned California highways dating back more than a century.
The improvement was dramatic. District engineer E. E. Wallace described the old road as “a tortuous, steep and narrow roadway” featuring about 50 curves between Del Mar and La Jolla and a grade as steep as 18 percent in some places. Wallace wrote: “This last link provides a most attractive entrance to the city, as well as a rapid and uninterrupted access for traffic.”
UP FROM SAN DIEGO
Traveling north from the border, you can still follow the surface streets that served as U.S. 101 before it was replaced in stages, first by the Carlsbad-Oceanside Freeway in the early 1950s and later by Interstate 5.
Starting at the San Ysidro border crossing, take Beyer Boulevard northwest; it’ll curve more directly north and turn into Broadway through Chula Vista and then National City Boulevard in National City.
From there, the alignment shifted over the years. An official Highway Department map from 1944 shows the route jogging westward at 8th Street in National City, then funneling traffic onto the coastal Harbor Drive, bypassing downtown San Diego. Harbor became the Pacific Highway north of downtown San Diego and Rose Canyon Road north of Mission Bay.
An earlier alignment, though, sent the road straight into the heart of San Diego. Instead of veering west on 8th Street, traffic in 1933 continued north on National Boulevard for another half mile or so before veering northwest on Main Street, turning north for a short block on 31st, then east on a different National Avenue, north for two short blocks on 26th, and northwest on Logan until it curved due north as 16th Street. From there, it was maybe a quarter mile to Broadway, where the route turned westward just south of Balboa Park. (A later alignment followed Market, just south of Broadway, turned west instead.)
A cyclist makes his way south on U.S. 101 in northern San Diego County, where U.S. 101 retains much of its historic charm.
After about a mile on Broadway, 101 turned north again on India—two blocks east of the later Pacific Highway route—and curved around, following the outline of San Diego Bay before continuing north.
Instead of following Rose Canyon Road north from there, an earlier alignment, seen on a 1922 map, shows the route veering off west again north of Mission Bay on Garnet Boulevard all the way to the coast, where travelers were sent north again along Mission Boulevard/La Jolla Boulevard. This route followed the contours of the La Jolla peninsula and went through the heart of La Jolla before pushing more directly north again along Torrey Pines Road.
This road led to the modern “old” 101 along the coast, otherwise known as the Carlsbad Highway—a stretch of about 20 miles through the seaside towns of Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff, Encinitas, Carlsbad, and Oceanside.
PRESERVED IN TIME
This section of highway still exists today. If you want to see what U.S. 101 once looked like, there’s no better place to start than the Carlsbad Highway. Cyclists drawn to the sunshine and sea breeze pedal past on a tree-lined highway that parallels the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail line. These tracks still carry “Coaster” trains along the old coastal strip between San Diego and Oceanside.
Although the cities have nearly grown together now, they’re still separated by lagoons and strips of undeveloped sandy beaches, and each retains its own flavor.
Del Mar, with its iconic racetrack, is where the wealthy still come to play. Shoppers and diners—both locals and tourists—still make Stratford Square a popular destination. The English Tudor-style structure at the southwest corner of 101 and 15th Street was built in 1927. Now home to a variety of shops and restaurants, it was built by Herman Kockritz as a companion building to the Hotel Del Mar across the street. It originally housed a pharmacy, soda fountain, market, barber shop, dress shop, and doctor’s office, providing essential services to the community and tourists at the hotel.
A new owner bought both Stratford Square and the hotel in 1943, but he didn’t care for the Tudor style, painting over the wooden planking and brick. Stratford Square outlasted the hotel, which was torn down in 1969, and the Old English flavor of the building was all but forgotten until the paint was removed, revealing its original character. The building fell into disrepair and might have been torn down itself, with its second-floor apartments having become a hippie hangout by 1971. But Jim Watkins purchased it, converted the apartments into retail spaces and renovated the building, which was designated a historical landmark in 1978.
The Watkins family still owned the building which, as of 2017, housed two restaurants and five retail shops on the ground floor, with offices and a museum on the second story.
Up the coast in Encinitas, you’ll pass a large piece of property fronted by a massive, square structure with four arches topped by a decorative golden dome. It looks like something you’d see at the Taj Mahal, and it marks the front entrance to the Encinitas Temple of the Self-Realization Fellowship, founded in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogananda. The site, dotted with tall, swaying palm trees, was still open as of 2016, featuring lush meditation gardens and a full schedule of inspirational lectures and programs.
Stratford Square offers shopping and dining to locals and travelers on 101 in the upscale San Diego County community.
Yogananda liked to visit the place to pray and meditate in two caves that were built into the face of the ocean bluff. He wrote his Autobiography of a Yogi on the site, an isolated promontory overlooking the ocean that became home to a lavish 16-room mansion in the mid-1930s. He didn’t build the hermitage on the site himself: It was a surprise gift from a Kansas City insurance executive that greeted the yogi when he returned from India for a visit.
“I saw a building jutting out like a great white ocean liner toward the blue brine,” Yogananada recalled. “The stately central hall, with immense ceiling-high windows, looks out on an altar of grass, ocean and sky: a symphony in emerald, opal and sapphire.”
The hermitage was part of a $400,000 improvement project—more than $6.6 million in 2016 dollars.
Unfortunately for the yogi and his followers, his Golden Lotus Temple turned out to be on shaky ground—literally. Just five years after the expansion was completed, adherents in the temple gardens heard the sound of the building’s frame and stucco creaking. The original plan was to move the building inland, but the cliff face underneath it was eroding so rapidly that the yogi’s followers had to be content with saving the furnishings, oriental rugs, and fixtures from the interior. The building itself collapsed into the ocean—all except for the temple tower, which was salvaged and relocated to the front of the grounds along Highway 101. It’s that tower, with its four archways and golden dome, that greets visitors passing by there today.
Over the years, the site’s lavish architecture brought attention to the area at the south end of Encinitas, with the yogi’s presence inspiring the name of Swami’s State Beach, a popular surfing spot nearby. The Beach Boys even mentioned Swami’s (right before Pacific Palisades) in their musical tribute to point breaks and pipelines, “Surfin’ USA.” Across the highway, Swami’s Café and Bar serves up a full menu that includes everything from a Swami’s granola Belgian waffle to a Swami club sandwich and a Swami’s Surprise smoothie.
Encinitas residents had a love-hate relationship with the 17-acre temple, which was at times rumored (falsely) to be a nudist colony and front for wild parties. Making matters worse, the temple negotiated the closure of two public streets through the compound, funneling local traffic out onto the highway and spawning protests about congestion. But the fellowship made up for it by donating time and money toward the effort to build the Interstate 5 bypass.
The fellowship expanded internationally, with more than 500 sites around the world, including seven temples in California (the others are in Hollywood, Glendale, Fullerton, Pacific Palisades, San Diego, and Berkeley). The Hollywood temple was founded in 1942, the same year the Encinitas temple fell into the ocean.
Yogananda died in 1952.
The Golden Lotus Temple of the Self-Realization Fellowship inspired the name of Swami’s State Beach in Encinitas.
UP THE ROAD
Other, less ostentatious but equally historical landmarks lie northward along the Old 101. La Paloma Theatre, one of a few historic theaters that still line the highway, is a Spanish-style cinema built in 1928 that sits a stone’s throw away from the Encinitas arch spanning the highway. It’s not the original sign but a replica installed in 2000 that helped restore the feel of an era when steel and stucco arches welcomed visitors to many towns along this and other California highways.
Carlsbad followed suit with its own replica sign over 101 at Carlsbad Village Drive in 2014, modeled after a sign that stood nearby in the 1930s. In re-creating the sign, the community only had a black-and-white photo as its guide and had to guess at the central color—eventually choosing navy blue. The neon-lit sign, measuring 82 feet across, cost $225,000, with a local company footing the bill.
Also in Encinitas is the Daley Double, a bar and cocktail lounge that opened as the Village Rendezvous in 1934, right after the repeal of Prohibition, and has been serving drinks ever since. The original owner was Maurice DeLay, who reportedly ran an illegal poker parlor upstairs before selling the place in 1942. He shouldn’t be confused with Frank Daley, a former hockey player who bought and renamed it in 1957.
Daley, also known as “Dapper Dan,” played five games at left wing for the NHL’s Detroit Cougars—since renamed the Red Wings—in 1930. He didn’t score a goal and spent the rest of his career in the minors with teams in Cleveland, Seattle, and elsewhere before retiring in 1945 and winding up in Encinitas.
The bar was the scene of a bizarre incident in 2002, when an off-duty U.S. Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President Dick Cheney’s detail bit off part of another man’s ear during a fight outside. A jury eventually ruled that the agent, Kelly Ward, had been ambushed by the other man and had acted in self-defense.
A couple of local fast-food institutions, Angelo’s and Roberto’s, have multiple locations along the highway.
Angelo’s Burgers is a family-owned business that dates back to 1977 and has four locations in northern San Diego County—all of them along the Coast Highway. The Encinitas location is a funky building with a pair of dining rooms separated by a covered drive-through lane that runs between them. It looks almost as much like an old gas station/garage as it does like an eatery.
There are three more locations to the north in Oceanside, one of which features a statue named Angelo Man greeting customers outside. He wasn’t always Angelo Man, though. That big frosty mug of root beer in his right hand is a dead giveaway that, in a previous life, he was Papa Burger, one of the “Burger Family” of mascots for A&W. As mentioned earlier, you can find other members of the Burger Family on Highway 41 at the 41 Café in Laton and just off Highway 99 in Selma, but Angelo Man may be the only one left in southern California.
The restaurant where Angelo Man stands was the first Angelo’s. It’s actually a former A&W, but it’s not Angelo Man’s original home: Owner Tony Regakis bought the statue from the other A&W location in town, at Coast Highway and Mission Avenue. The price? A paltry $100. Angelo Man was originally on the roof, like his “twin” Papa Burger at Winkins’ in Selma, but was later lowered to street level.
Angelo’s Burgers in Oceanside features a mascot it calls Angelo Man; in an earlier incarnation, he was known as Papa Burger and carried a mug of A&W root beer.
If Mexican food is more your speed, there’s Roberto’s. It’s the original “-berto’s” Mexican restaurant in San Diego County, which is saying something. One count, made in 2000, found 15 fast-food businesses with 123 outlets countywide making use of the suffix in their names, from Alberto’s and Aliberto’s (yes, two different places) to Jilberto’s and Hilberto’s. Not confusing at all, right?
Roberto Robledo grew up in a home built of mud and hay in San Luis, Mexico. A railroad and migrant farmworker, he spent $30 on a machine to make tortillas and $40 more on a station wagon to deliver them. A friend persuaded him to open his own restaurant, and in 1964, he and his wife Dolores started what the company website calls “San Diego’s first taco shop” in San Ysidro.
The business expanded, and Robledo died in 1999; today, family members run various eateries. Locations along Old 101 in San Diego’s North County include Encinitas and Solana Beach, but the chain reaches far beyond the coastal strip: As of 2017, the website listed 15 San Diego County locations and even more in Nevada, which boasted more than four dozen locations in the Las Vegas-Henderson area.
Oceanside has preserved its share of historic sites, including the Dolphin Hotel, which as of early 2017 closed for renovations. Opened in 1927 as the Hotel Keisker, the two-story, 25-room hotel is part of a block of buildings on the west side of the Coast Highway.
Down the street is the 101 Café, which former owner John Daley calls “the oldest café on Highway 101.”
It opened in 1928 as a 20-seat diner and tripled in size nine years later after Greyhound installed a bus stop in front of the building. The café eventually changed hands, and when the new bypass opened to the east in 1953, the owner changed course. Starting in the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s, John Graham operated it as a Graham’s Drive-In—one of three in the area—adding the overhang and a sign near the front of the building that advertised “car service.” When the drive-in craze began to wane, he converted it into a coffee shop, which was later rebranded as Randy’s by another new owner.
The décor at the 101 Café in Oceanside pays tribute to a simpler time along the highway.
When Daley bought the place with partner David Ranson in the 1980s, new customers started calling him “Randy,” so he restored the original name, transforming it into a nostalgic trip back in time with a 1950s flavor and a colorful mural on the south side of the building depicting its drive-in and “cruisin’ ” days. Daley was meticulous about restoring the café, making it look just the way it did in 1954. The same booths in use at that time were rebuilt and reupholstered to ensure its authenticity.
Daley and Ranson sold the 101 Café after three decades to Cesar Galvez of Del Mar, who has, as of this writing, preserved the café’s distinctive character.
The military town also has a pair of vintage movie houses within little more than a block of each other on Old 101. On the east side is the Star Theater, which opened in 1956 with a distinctive neon sign that still lights up the night.
Across the street is the older Sunshine Brooks Theater, which opened 20 years earlier as the Margo, the first major construction project downtown since the onset of the Depression. It was later renamed the Towne and takes its current name from former owner Hattie Hazel “Sunshine” Brooks.
The theater went downhill after 1953 when a highway bypass was built—the precursor to Interstate 5—and was, at one point, converted into a karate studio. These days, it’s a theater again, hosting live theater productions by the Oceanside Theatre Company.
SLAUGHTER ALLEY
That 1953 bypass—known as the Oceanside-Carlsbad Freeway—was the first segment of freeway built in San Diego County. The 10-mile stretch of road largely followed was completed in two phases The first consisted of widening Carlsbad Boulevard (still Old 101) for about three miles from La Costa Avenue north to Palomar Airport Drive. The second, longer section veered inland to follow the modern Interstate 5 alignment all the way to Oceanside.
Even with the bypass, though, traffic remained a major concern farther north, on an 18-mile stretch of the Old 101 between San Clemente and Oceanside, where 50,000 vehicles a day sped across a strip of highway known as “Slaughter Alley” in 1964.
The highway more than earned that name.
Five people died in a head-on collision there in August 1964, and an even more tragic accident occurred there just two weeks later, when eight people were killed and 40 injured in a head-on crash that involved a church bus and seven other vehicles. The adopted 12-year-old daughter of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans was one of those who lost their lives, along with another child who was traveling on the bus. Six people in a station wagon also died.
Those were just two of many crashes that occurred on the infamous stretch of asphalt. By the end of 1964, a record 39 people had been killed on that section of 101, and some of the worst was yet to come. On a foggy morning in February 1966, seven people died in an inferno ten miles north of Oceanside that began when two cars collided in the southbound lanes. A Greyhound bus pulled over, and someone got out to carry flares to the accident, stalling northbound traffic as motorists waited for the person to cross. That’s when a tanker truck filled with gasoline swerved to avoid a transport vehicle carrying seven new cars and slammed into the steel cable center divider.
Sunshine Brooks was the first major construction project in downtown Oceanside since the start of the Great Depression, opening in the mid-1930s.
A compact car carrying a man and his pregnant wife stopped between the tanker and auto transport just in time … but a supermarket food van wasn’t. It slammed into the couple’s car and threw it forward into the tanker, which exploded into a fireball, spilling burning gas over the gridlocked highway. The couple and their unborn child died, along with the driver of the supermarket van, as traffic backed up all the way to San Clemente.
Welcome to Carlsbad, just south of Oceanside on U.S. 101.
Still, the tragedy wasn’t over. Ten minutes later, about two miles north of the main accident, a second fuel tanker pulled to a halt, and a third tanker—unable to stop—pushed a stalled car into the tanker ahead of it. Both gasoline-filled transports burst into flames, along with six passenger cars in the area, a conflagration that left one of the tanker drivers and two other people dead. The seven people who died in the twin accidents were so badly burned that dental records were needed to identify them.
Cars were still smoldering four hours after the accident, while potatoes and onions spilled from the supermarket van “literally were ‘cooking’ on the pavement,” according to the Long Beach Independent. More than a dozen cars were wrecked, and 100 others were damaged. The accident claimed another victim three weeks later.
In the aftermath of the crash, California’s State Highway Division announced it would seek bids within a month to widen Slaughter Alley from four to eight lanes. And just four months after February’s highway inferno, a 25-mile portion of freeway known as Interstate 5 opened south of Carlsbad. The $33 million project bypassed the communities of Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff, Encinitas, and Leucadia to the south—an area also prone to accidents that was considered an extension of Slaughter Alley.
With the improvements, injuries and accidents between San Clemente and Oceanside both fell by 50 percent in 1968.
THE FLOWER FIELDS OF CARLSBAD
Today, that stretch of highway, flanked by the Camp Pendleton Marine base, crosses the only stretch of undeveloped land between the Los Angeles and San Diego metroplexes, but it wasn’t always that way. The towns of northern San Diego County, which have merged into an unbroken string of homes and businesses along Old 101, were once separated by plenty of open land. One vestige of that earlier era remains visible on the east side of Interstate 5: the Carlsbad Flower Fields, which these days are neighbors to a modern outlet mall.
Luther Gage, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Colorado, ran a nursery in Montebello and moved to Carlsbad in the 1920s. The South Coast Land Company had begun to develop the area, buying up land and bringing in water from the San Luis Rey River. Gage set up shop at Tamarack and Jefferson (then called Fourth Street), about three quarters of a mile east of Old 101 and barely more than a stone’s throw away from where I-5 would be built.
If there’s any doubt the area was still countryside back then, you could just ask the frequent visitors to Gage’s fields: flocks of owls that swooped in over the flowers, inspiring him to name his place Tecolote Gardens and sell his bulbs under that label (“tecolote” being Spanish for owls). He crossed strains of ranunculus from France, Australia, and Austria to produce a larger bloom, also growing baby gladiolas, corn lilies, and harlequin flowers, among others. He sold them to a Los Angelesbased wholesaler, which in turn distributed them across the United States and Europe.
His flower fields, however, were causing more of a nuisance than he could tolerate. Gage once remarked to someone who had stopped to look at his fields, “Publicity only means a lot of visitors, and as we do only a wholesale business, we have nothing to sell to visitors.”
Ultimately, it wasn’t Gage but one of his workers who made the flower fields famous. In 1928, Frank Frazee ventured out on his own, growing bulbs along with two of his sons on 1,000 acres on the Agua Hedionda Lagoon—a body of water in Carlsbad that runs about three miles inland from the sea under both Old 101 and I-5.
At one point, Frazee Flowers grew more ranunculus flowers than the next four biggest growers combined. Frazee and his sons moved the operation up the road to Camp Pendleton in 1938, but returned to the Carlsbad area two decades later, planting his bulbs on a plot of land owned by Paul Ecke Jr.
Today, more than 100,000 people flock to the fields during the first week of March every year, when the flowers are in bloom across 50 acres of Ecke’s land. The dazzling display is a multicolored reminder of a time when the 101/I-5 corridor wasn’t just office buildings, resorts, and tourist shops.
NORTH OF OCEANSIDE
Part of historic 101 survives in Camp Pendleton as a bike route that between Las Pulgas Road and Cristianitos Road. An old mileage sign remained there until a fire destroyed it in 2007, many of its letters having peeled off by that time. It showed a distance of 12 miles to San Clamente, 48 miles to Anaheim, and 76 miles to Los Angeles.
El Camino Real heads north from Cristianitos Road for a couple of miles before crossing under the modern freeway into San Clemente. The huge sign for Tommy’s Family Restaurant just beyond the freeway underpass welcomes you to the city. Tommy’s has been there ever since I can remember—I stopped there with my parents back in the 1970s—and today it’s a ’50s-themed diner with plenty of seating. Richard Nixon, a San Clemente resident, reportedly dined there frequently.
The old highway winds through the center of town and down toward the ocean, where it continues north to Dana Point as the Coast Highway and diverges into State Route 1, the old 101 Alternate and Camino Capistrano, the main route north into San Juan Capistrano.
Farther north, there’s about a four-mile stretch of old highway called Cabot Road west of and parallel to the modern freeway into Mission Viejo, where the old road was overlaid by the current freeway. It emerges again to veer northeast for about a mile on Sand Canyon Road, then doubles back along Trabuco Road, which now ends at Culver Drive but once upon a time hooked up with El Camino Real into Tustin.
The roads had different names back in the day: 101 passed El Toro as San Juan Road, then became Laguna Road from Irvine into Tustin.
Tommy’s Restaurant, with its huge sign just off the freeway, is impossible to miss at El Camino Real in San Clemente.
