Located minutes from downtown San Diego, Balboa Park is a major urban cultural and horticultural center that welcomes more than 14 million visitors each year. Called the Smithsonian of the West, it includes more than 85 cultural attractions, among them 15 museums, the Globe Theatres, and the San Diego Zoo, while its palms, lawns, and changing floral displays have also made it famous as a horticultural paradise. The park encompasses 1,200 acres, making it the largest urban park in the U.S. and the largest cultural complex west of the Mississippi, and it was the site of the 1935 World Expo. Its development was shaped by Kate Olivia Sessions, who moved her nursery to the area in 1892, planted 100 trees each year in the park and provided 300 more for the city, helped form the Park Improvement Committee in 1902 with George Marston and Mary B. Coulston, and transformed the land from a dry landscape into the oasis for which she became known as the Mother of Balboa Park. Balboa Park also reflects the legacies of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, held to honor completion of the Panama Canal and to boost San Diego’s economy, and the 1935-36 California-Pacific International Exposition, whose buildings and styles range from Spanish Colonial Revival to influences from early Aztec, Mexican pueblo, art deco, and arte moderne. Among its notable features are the California Building, designed by Bertram G. Goodhue for the 1915 Exposition and now housing the San Diego Museum of Man; a carousel built in 1910 and operating in the park since 1922 that still offers the brass ring; distinctive gardens including the Japanese Friendship Garden and the Botanical Building; the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, home since 1914 to the world’s largest outdoor pipe organ; and the House of Hospitality, which entertained dignitaries in the 1930s and served as a U.S. Navy annex during World War II.
