Publisher’s Note: Reflections on a 75-Year-Old Living Legacy

July Travel Edition Pub Note

Welcome aboard our summer travel issue. We’re happy to have you along for the ride as we celebrate the human urge to venture out into the unknown. This is a fun issue to tuck into your carry-on and read in the air.

Truthfully, I don’t enjoy getting on planes. But I love getting off of them to explore new places. See, I came into this world wanting to experience as much of it as I possibly can. There’s a fire burning in my belly that refuses to calm until I’ve learned how to say “howdy” in every dialect of every language, lit a candle in every temple, and stepped in every river. Twice. Until I’ve tasted every dish in every back alley and home kitchen in every city, small town, and village and hiked every mountain and breathed in every vista and contemplated every remaining glacier. Sounds like a compulsion, I know. But really it’s a hunger to learn. It’s why I became a reporter, to better understand this world and the people in it.

Travel, I’ve found, is a great teacher. Immersing ourselves in unfamiliar places often means being pushed out of our comfort zones, which is where important lessons can be learned. Ever been sweating and lost in a city in which you don’t speak or read the language, and still found your way? Traveling builds a unique kind of confidence.

But it’s important to remember that while travel can be a valuable learning experience, it’s also a great privilege. Traveling means different things to different people. Many have to wander to survive.

As we go to press, the humanitarian crisis at the SD-Mexico border is simmering after hitting a boiling point. In May, more than 1,000 people seeking asylum landed in various makeshift migrant camps in the desert outside Jacumba Hot Springs while waiting to be processed by US Border Patrol. Families with children in the cold desert at night, without blankets, food, or water, and no shelter in the heat of the day. Some of them had traveled for weeks.

On page 38, you’ll find our exclusive cover story about a newly revamped hotel in Jacumba Hot Springs, slated to reopen its doors this month after being acquired by a newly minted hospitality group of creative designers. It’s a cool, visually engaging piece we thought might inspire our readers to pack their bags.

But there’s much more to the story now. Because when the various people working to get the hotel open found themselves on the front lines of the border crisis, they stepped up to collect and deliver supplies to the people in the camps.

Jeff Osborne is part of the group behind the hotel project. “We just started organizing,” he told me. “Buying blankets, food, water. Our office became our crisis headquarters. Everyone in the local community was dropping off whatever we needed. We had over 3,000 individually packaged survival kits by the end.”

Talk about hospitality.

“I think we brought a lot of relief to people who were in some really awful conditions,” Osborne said.

It takes true courage to travel penniless across continents in search of safety or a better life, or simply because you don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s not a type of traveling I’ve ever had to do, and as someone who’s spent a lot of time on the road, I respect it tremendously.

So while celebrating our wanderlust in this issue, I also want to celebrate the travelers who were camped in the desert and the lessons we can learn from their determination. Travel, after all, is a great teacher, even if we’re not the ones on the move.

Wildlife specialist Brittany Vega, making a core memory.

Photo Credit: Mateo Hoke

Let’s be honest—all babies are precious, but not all babies are cute. Lucky for us all, though, we happen to have one that’s both in this month’s Sacred Space story: an endangered California Condor, fresh from the shell.

It was 5:31 a.m. on a Monday when the call came through. Baby was hatching, so SDM‘s videographer, Jeremy, and I high-tailed it out to Escondido to be there as the first condor of the year emerged at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

Condors are critically endangered. In the ’80s, less than two dozen remained. Two dozen. Those aren’t great odds. It’s taken incredible efforts on the part of indigenous tribes, US Fish and Wildlife, the SD Zoo, and other partners of the California Condor Recovery Program to bring these special birds back from the brink. There are now more than 500. And now, there’s one more.

A handful of us stood half-circled around the incubator. Two were wildlife specialists, including 33-year-old Brittany Vega, working her first day in the bird program. She teared up as she held the baby condor, weighing it and helping ensure it was cleaned properly to avoid infection.

Just imagine.

“It was a core memory. Getting to watch a chick hatch in real time and hold it during its first few breaths of life brought on overwhelming excitement and joy,” she said later. “It was definitely a struggle to hold back tears.”

You weren’t the only one, Brittany. It was incredible.

It’s with similar excitement that we’re exploring North County in this month’s issue of SDM. And we’re not just talking about the coast. North County is so much more than sunsets and surfers. We’re feasting in Escondido and Vista. We’re contemplating the importance of vibrant third places while revisiting the North County Fair and seeing what $2 billion builds in San Marcos.

But don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten the unique culture of the coast. We’re bringing you inside a new, slightly denser mode of building in Encinitas. We’re celebrating NoCo music, biking the 101, exploring what’s new in the food scene, and getting an inside view of O’side. We’ve also put together a funky little lookback of North County ads and coverage from our archives as we continue celebrating 75 years of SDM.

And, as you may have noticed, that condor isn’t the only bird in this issue. Check out the maximalist, wallpaper-worthy watercolor cover our art director Samantha Lacy painted. Sam is from Encinitas and chose to highlight species native to the coasts and marshlands of North County. It’s fun to get lost in.

And so is North County. So off we go.

P.S. Public visits to the condor breeding program facilities are strictly prohibited, but you can peek inside with more photos and a vid of the baby’s momentous birth.

The duck hash from Craft & Commerce.

It’s a simple, revolutionary product improvement. Identify the hole in the market, fill it with hollandaise and bubbles. At some point in American history, breakfast became an alternative form of Novocaine; eating it made us feel nothing. We don’t take any pride in cooking it. We often eat it mid-text.

We’ve been told in the old days you could blissfully read the paper, casually chew eggs, idly chat about current events and offshore tax shelters with your kids. The storm of tasks politely waited to assault you until you walked through the office door.

But the modern world is far too rushed for casual egg chewing. Our phones ping the to-do list to our brains about an hour before we wake. Plus, according to the medical community, breakfast must be jam-packed with micronutrients and proteins if we want to have the right kind of mental clarity and energy required to succeed and invest in the right crypto.

And so breakfast became the most humorless, dry, healthy, utilitarian meal of the day. It’s eating as a job.

That’s why, when local restaurants seriously started investing in morningfood, it felt like such a revelation. Adding a quality cocktail (or even dimestore near-Champagne)? What a release! What a rebrand! It was like that famed Apple Macintosh commercial in 1984—where an auditorium full of bored, ashen post-apocalyptic blokes are watching a bony dictator talk on screen in black-and-white, then are bolted back to life by a woman in colorful dolphin shorts throwing her sledgehammer at the whole shebang. Brunch (and the improvement of morningfood, in general) is that fun hammer.

Another reason brunch has boomed in recent years is because it executed another classic move of the rebrand—took something that was rarefied as a “massive spend, a special occasion thing” and democratized it. Not a ton. It’s still going to set you back. But brunch used to only exclusively be served at big-date restaurants and resorts. You didn’t even order à la carte—just paid for a ticket like the carving station was a T-Swift show.

Then the neighborhood joints and moms and pops got into the morningfood action. Turns out you could do brunch without charging a billion dollars. Especially if cooks lean heavily on baked goods, since flour and sugar don’t break the bank like fancy proteins do (although the current Fabergé price of eggs is raining on this a bit). Brunch is like so many things in the world that started off prohibitively expensive and then boomed when the price came down for us commoners (air travel, cars, TVs, even vacuum cleaners and tea).

And finally, the joie de day drinking can’t be overstated. It’s not about obliteration. Just mellow buzzes at unconventional times. The day has now been chalked up to nonproductivity. Anti-productivity. And honestly, that feels great. So a wet brunch is a liberation of an entire day.

The buzz is different when the sun is out. It inverts your circadian rhythms. Your body mistakenly thinks it is Saturday night. Oh no, body, it’s laundry time. Plus, daytime is when to-do’s are done. Our bodies and brains are primed for executing laborious yet necessary life tasks. And for this one glorious day, the only to we’re tasked with doing is not talking about or doing to’s. In fact, don’t even talk to us about work or exercise. The psychic baggage of your desire to be a productive member of society is bumming out the flavor of this hash.

This issue is dedicated to the people of the morningfood. The people who freed us of our dead-hearted breakfast routine. The people who liberate days.

hairy chair pub note

It was checkered, made of some rough cloth. Almost hairy. I remember someone rocking it back and forth, always. You pulled the wooden lever on the side and it expanded to become a great, kinda hairy cradle to nap or end days. And that old, plush rocking chair was the “home” within our home.

At age seven, when I decided to cut my own hair the day before school photos—removing an oh-dear-god-sized chunk from the front, so that I looked like the lead singer of an off-brand new wave band—mom rocked me until I stopped crying. I can still think of that chair and feel an old centering.

And I can still see the decorative carvings of the coffee table from my childhood. And the latte-colored hutch where mom kept her German beer steins—ornate chalices that looked like tiny castles built for monk booze. Still see the sheen from the glazed clay bowls we bought from a potter whose shop was up in the hills of Fallbrook, down some dirt road I can still hear crackling and popping under our tires.

Our home was a modest one-story in suburban San Diego. It wasn’t an architectural wonder filled with expensive things. Just important things. Things that came into our house without any emotional power or meaning or baggage, and we slowly but surely imbued them with all of those things.

Now, at our place in OB, high above the stairs there’s a stained glass depicting a seagull, aloft on a strong wind and beach-house cliches. Never fancied myself a stained glass guy. As a kid raised in church, makes me want to count my sins and juggle my guilts. But it casts the whole downstairs in a groovy baby blue light, and that’s the hue I now associate with our family, with my strongest love. We have a couch we loathe, but its scratchy discomfort has become part of our story. We have photos of New York, where my wife, Claire, is from. Her first concept of home.

Point is, inhabiting a well-designed place isn’t a frilly concept. Environmental psychologists say our homes give us a vital sense of control, dependability. Every day we go out into the world and encounter all kinds of unpredictabilities and chaos. Home is the antidote for that guessing game. We know where the snacks are. We can navigate it without thinking; we’ve created our own supremely comfortable nooks within it. Anyone who’s been camping for days in the dirt without a mattress or warm water on command knows how ecstatic—near spiritual—it feels to make it home, shower, and climb into your side of the bed.

Creating spaces is a pretty basic, ancient human instinct. The earliest evidence of humans decorating the rooms they lived in seems to be the ancient Egyptians, who hung animal skins and decorative urns in their mud huts.

But I’ll bet it started way before that. Soon as we grabbed the hand of evolution and yanked ourselves out of the rivers and oceans, once our brains grew beyond a jumble of basic instincts, I bet we decorated the crannies we crawled into, tried to shape them into something not just livable but memorable.

While we’re generally more agnostic about our homes in the West, many Eastern cultures claim to have an emotional if not spiritual interdependence with their homes. That is why designers talk of “energies” and feng shui. Home is a living entity with a rather large say in our own emotional well-being.

A 2008 study by Pew Research asked people where “in their heart” they considered to be home. Only 22 percent said it was where they currently lived. So I guess, until the rest of us get there, we’re just temporarily occupying spaces and making them feel like our own.

And that doesn’t mean being the possessor of all the things—just the things that give us a sense of us. Some of my prized home/design/living objects I’ve found in garage sales and in the generosity of friends; some of my prized objects I saw the value in, saved for, bought with a clenching and a gasp. I’ve been in multimillion dollar homes that took my breath away, and multimillion dollar homes that looked like the very concept of ersatz has vomited.

When Claire first moved to San Diego, she and I lived in a rented one-bedroom that was the perfect amount of magic. Whether browsing the Cedros Design District or the Swap Meet design district, or whether it’s one of a kind or a billion of a kind—if it speaks to you, listen.

For this Living & Design issue, we explored the way modern San Diego designers and creatives are building spaces that speak: one about creating a walkable future of neighborhoods in Carlsbad; another an absolute gawking of what one of the top architects can create with a rarefied budget; a creative company who designs the functional beauty of some of the city’s top restaurants; and a list of favorite home objects from the director of a modern art compound.

For the cover, we asked San Diego graffiti artist Maxx Moses to show us his personal version of home in his trademark dreamy collage style. Raised in Yonkers, NY, he’s been local for 15 years and teaches local kids graffiti art in his studio in Encanto.

Hope the ideas in here help you find your own almost hairy chair.

Jan 2023 pub note

Junior year of high school, I was summoned from English class to the principal’s office. Escorted by school security, I walked slow, like someone who knows they’re about to find themselves in the deep end of a port-o. My stomach bubbled with anxiety, turning completely sour as I entered the office to see my dad already there, seated and waiting. The mood, instantly serious. Quickly I learned we were gathered to discuss whether or not I would be expelled.

I’d been ratted out. For a number of weeks, I had written, printed, and surreptitiously distributed an underground newspaper—a single-side, four-column, 8×11 screed titled Amendment One. In it, I anonymously railed against the perceived injustices of high school life, using choice expletives to call out by name the vice principals who policed our hallways like law enforcement rather than as educators. Like so many American schools, ours was underperforming, our district underfunded. School was rough. Our school newspaper, a joke. Needing an outlet, I made my own.

Half of what I wrote was libelous, the other half naive and poorly written, but I had the fight in me. I believed in the power of writing then as I do now.

That trouble I brought upon myself was the beginning of a writing career that has spanned two decades, two books, and now fortunately, brings me to San Diego Magazine as the new executive editor, helping content chief Troy Johnson lead our editorial vision into the new year alongside managing editor Jackie Bryant, digital editor Nicolle Monico, and art director Samantha Lacy. It’s an exciting time to be here. With new-ish ownership and an extended team any media org would be fortunate to have, we have big plans for 2023. We’re bringing new stories, new perspectives, and new ways of thinking about San Diego.

And we’re celebrating a major milestone.

This year marks SDM’s 75th birthday, rarefied air for a regional magazine, and a true testament to our readers and this region. We hope you’ll join us as we celebrate all year long, both in our pages and at monthly events.

To pay homage to just how far this magazine-slash-media company has come, we’re sharing vintage covers throughout the year, along with contemporary remakes we’ve commissioned from local artists. We want to honor and examine where we’ve come from, while continuing to build on this legacy, both for the magazine and for the city.

In the print issue on page 18, you’ll find the very first SDM cover from October 1948, paired with a present-day rendering we commissioned. The original cover depicts an illustration of the Majestic Hotel, at the time, one of San Diego’s most notable gathering places. The remix features Petco Park, one of today’s most iconic San Diego spots and hub of community spirit.

Speaking of covers, ours have been vibrant lately. We’re doing work we’re proud of, and this month is no exception. Tired of seeing only young women associated with wellness, we asked local social media star and busy dad, Sholom Ber Solomon, if he’d let us slather him with seaweed goo while he relaxed next to the pool at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar. People of all hirsuteness levels deserve care, after all, and he is fabulously photogenic. A natural cover star.

We can’t wait for what’s to come. Luckily, I didn’t get kicked out of school, but it’s been an interesting road from the principal’s office.

Here’s to the next 75,

Mateo Hoke, Executive Editor