California in 1935 - San Diego, Coronado, Sacramento

Lowell E. Jones published this street map of San Diego in 1935, engraved and printed by the local firm of Frye & Smith, as a stand-alone pictorial guide rather than a plate drawn from a larger atlas. Pictorial city maps like this one were a distinctly twentieth-century genre, blending straightforward road navigation with a decorative, promotional style meant to appeal to the tourists and new arrivals flooding into booming Depression-era San Diego, and Jones's sheet carries a numbered list of local points of interest in its upper corner alongside a compass rose for orientation. The map is classified as a separate, single-sheet publication rather than an atlas plate, and its bold, clearly labeled road network reflects San Diego's rapid 1930s growth as the city expanded its street grid inland from the historic harbor core. This kind of practical, publicly distributed city map stands in contrast to the ornate ward-based atlas plates typical of the previous century, favoring function and promotion over decorative engraving.

Mission Bay is prominently outlined along the shoreline, its detailed coastline rendered as one of the map's most distinctive natural features, alongside the wider sweep of the Pacific Ocean bordering the city's western edge. The road network fans out from the historic downtown core in a dense, carefully labeled grid, reflecting the meticulous cartographic detail Jones and his engravers put into a map meant for everyday navigation rather than display. A numbered key of local attractions, beaches, parks, and buildings runs down the sheet's corner, giving the map a practical, visitor-facing purpose that distinguishes it from the strictly administrative city plans of the nineteenth century. Together the bay, the ocean frontage, and the labeled points of interest capture San Diego as a city actively marketing itself to newcomers during the 1930s.

This map is a natural pick for a San Diego family, a Southern California transplant who first came to know the city through its beaches, or a collector interested in the more casual, tourist-facing pictorial maps that emerged in the early twentieth century. It stands alone among the Vault's San Diego offerings, a Depression-era counterpart to the nineteenth-century ward plans found elsewhere in the collection's California holdings, distinguished by its pictorial, visitor-oriented style rather than administrative ward boundaries. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.