The Romance of Balboa Park

By Florence Christman

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0918740037
• ISBN13: 9780918740038
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: San Diego Historical Society
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.3" x 0.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Readable, entertaining and informative

Florence Christman's was an amateur historian. For that reason, her book appeals more to general readers than it does to professional historians. It focuses on people and not on the political and economic factors that shaped the City of San Diego's history. The author's enthusiasm enlivens her text. She helped to formulate commonly-held ideas that Balboa Park is "the City's Community Center" and that "the park has something for everybody." With such all-embracing views, it is obvious her bias was toward praise rather than criticism. The 1985 edition was extensively re-written. Consequently flow, organization and accuracy are greatly improved. Christman had an eye for human idiosyncracies. The many personalitiies she described are so vivid they leap off the page. The book has a general and timeless character so that it is as revealing today as it was when published. It covers Balboa Park's main attractions and institutions adequately and stops well short of boredom and punditry. The index is a help for anyone who wants to know specific details without reading the book from cover to cover. With Florence Christman's passing San Diego lost a civilized and cultured woman whose laughter can still be heard in the pages of her book.

Excellent Graphics and photo's;

This book, for anyone who lives in San Diego or has visited the area, would be very interesting if it had a bit more detail about the contextualized region and time when the park was first developed. The book had a number of excellent illustrations, though the park plot diagrams are so small and detailed that they are extremely difficult to use. This park is the jewel of San Diego, a natural resource of incredible vistas, grand old buildings - most of which have been painstakeingly rebuilt to the original specifications, and cultural events. This book describes some of the developmental process. I reccommend it as good reading for anyone who is coming to San Diego to visit. It reveals some of the "movers and shakers" of the city during the late 1800's and into the 1900's. As a city resident for over 30 years, the book was very useful in my Master's program in History, as a source for general information about the development of the park.