The Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888 and immediately drew the wealthy — families with the time and money for a season on the beach. But the hotel's original developer, Elisha Babcock, had a different vision for the beach just to the south.
On June 10, 1900, he opened Tent City — a planned canvas community on Coronado Beach designed for middle-class families who wanted the sun, the surf, and the society of the resort without the hotel's rates. Tents rented for two dollars a week. Within a season it had become a city in its own right.
Tent City was not roughing it. The tents were arranged on a grid of named streets, each unit with a wooden floor and frame. The community had electric lighting, running water, and sewage infrastructure. Amenities included a grocery store, a soda fountain, a library, a small theater, a bandstand, a dance pavilion, a carousel, a shooting gallery, and a restaurant. Organized activities ran daily. The beach was steps away.
At its peak in the early 1910s, Tent City drew thousands of families each summer from Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, and the inland valleys — people for whom the beach had previously been unreachable either geographically or financially. The Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe railroads ran excursion fares to San Diego specifically to serve the Tent City crowd.
Tent City operated every summer from 1900 through 1938, with the exception of the World War I years when the military used the beach. It declined in the 1930s as automobile ownership made the coast generally more accessible and competing beach towns drew the summer crowd. The last season was 1938. The tents came down, the wooden infrastructure was removed, and the beach returned to sand.
No physical trace of Tent City remains. The Coronado shoreline south of the Hotel del Coronado is now the same beach it was before 1900 — wide, sandy, open, backed by the dunes that separate the beach from the Silver Strand. From the water, nothing distinguishes this stretch of shore from any other California beach.
What it held across those summers — the canvas grid, the dance pavilion, the families who could not otherwise have afforded this view — exists only in photographs and in the accounts of people who were children there and grew old somewhere else.
Sources: Hotel del Coronado history archives; Coronado Historical Association records; San Diego History Center photograph collection.
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