San Diego built this for the 1915 Panama–California Exposition — a city of fewer than 40,000 people announcing itself to the world, on the strength of a new canal and a good harbor. The tower still stands over Balboa Park. The ambition it was built to carry is still a fair standard for the city.

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Jimmy LaValle came out of San Diego’s music scene and built The Album Leaf around patience — slow instrumentals that trust you to stay. This record was made in Iceland with members of Sigur Rós, but the temperament is Pacific: unhurried, clear, warm.

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“Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage
of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”

Salk gave his polio vaccine away — “could you patent the sun?” — and then built his institute on the mesa in La Jolla, telling the architect Louis Kahn to make a place worthy of a visit by Picasso. Science that expected art. It is a short drive from here, and it still keeps that standard.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography began in 1903 in a boathouse, and grew into one of the great centers for studying the sea. The ocean off this coast has been an instrument of science for a century — the same water you can swim in this afternoon.

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That is the whole letter. Next Monday, another.

The Daily · San Diego Institute of Technology