14 things to do in North Park, the liveliest hipster haven of San Diego

At Lovesong Coffee, the bold and beautiful gather to sip caffeinated concoctions and peck at laptops in a space as bright and minimal as a stage set.

A few blocks away at sleek ramen restaurant Underbelly, a well-tattooed young customer sits at the bar in snug jeans and a crop top displaying the words: “I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison.”

Meanwhile, workers put the finishing touches on the LaFayette Hotel, a lavishly redesigned midcentury landmark reopening tomorrow with several on-site restaurants and bars. One room looks like a Parisian salon, another like a ’40s diner, another like an old Mexican church, the light filtered through stained-glass windows.

“This is either going to be something really special,” says co-owner Arsalun Tafazoli, “or one of the biggest flameouts in San Diego hospitality history.”

This neighborhood, Angelenos, might be the liveliest corner of San Diego that you’ve never heard of, a place with more beer, more resilience and less parking than you’d suspect. To get in on the action, head north of Balboa Park and look for the NORTH PARK sign rising over the middle of University Avenue.

Here, you’ll find breweries and gastropubs, a seafood joint that recently won praise from the Michelin people, a listening bar with a stash of buyable classic vinyl in the backroom, and a 90-foot-long mural outside Verbatim Books that features a typewriter protruding from the roof and a crazed face in a doorway between oversize horror books. It might be Stephen King. Or his evil twin.

As I approached the crazed face, I found longtime North Park local Jay Lind already on the sidewalk, grabbing photos with his phone. The neighborhood “has really blossomed,” he told me.

Many of North Park’s most visible assets, including the mural, the LaFayette’s new incarnation, the listening bar and seafood restaurant Mabel’s Gone Fishing, have only shown up in the last two years. But as someone who first encountered this neighborhood decades ago and renewed the acquaintance in recent weeks, I know there’s a backstory — by turns inspiring and horrific — just beneath its well-decorated surface.

It was 1893 when neighborhood pioneer James Monroe Hartley decided to start a lemon orchard on 40 acres north of the city’s biggest park. But soon he realized there wasn’t enough water to irrigate it.

If life won’t give you lemons, you can’t make lemonade. But if you’re in Southern California, you can still develop a residential neighborhood. Which Hartley did.

Before long, North Park had grown to include about 30,000 residents in about three square miles, just south of Mission Valley, just east of Hillcrest (and just north of Balboa Park, of course). Its many Craftsman homes and Spanish Revival bungalows made it one of the most densely populated areas in the city, with streetcars running up and down 30th Street and University Avenue, the neighborhood’s thirst fed by a water tower that’s still a local landmark.

In the 1960s, suburbanization and the completion of Interstate 8 in Mission Valley began draining the area of money and homeowners. Look-alike apartment buildings multiplied where bungalows once stood. (Even now, you can start a healthy debate among longtime locals just by saying the most prolific apartment mogul’s name: Ray Huffman.)

North Park’s commercial strips, El Cajon Boulevard, University Avenue and 30th Street, slipped into a long slump. And then came Flight 182.

On Sept. 25, 1978, an incoming PSA 727 and a small Cessna collided 2,600 feet above North Park, raining wreckage on the neighborhood. The disaster, which killed 137 people aboard the aircraft and seven on the ground, remains the deadliest plane crash in California history.

For years afterward, said Joseph Kraft, owner of Atypical Waffle Co. on 30th Street, “North Park really went downhill. Nobody wanted to live here.”

So much has changed since then, in part because of the area’s central location and surging demand from young families seeking relatively affordable homes.

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“When my wife and I first bought a house in 1998, there were a couple of restaurants, Caffé Calabria and Ranchos Cocina. And [much of] the rest was boarded-up buildings. It’s come a long way,” said Mark West, executive director of Main Street North Park.

Those two restaurants are still neighborhood fixtures, Calabria known for roasting its own coffee beans, Ranchos known for its vegan and vegetarian dishes. Other locals speak reverently of restaurants Urban Solace and the Linkery, along with gastropubs Toronado and Hamilton’s Tavern, all opened between 2004 and 2009, all gone now.

But in their wake came eateries like City Tacos and Breakfast Republic, both born in North Park in 2014-15 and grown to include locations across Southern California. There’s also Artelexia boutique, which specializes in colorful Mexican fare and last year sprouted an adjacent kitchenware offshoot, Casa y Cocina. There’s the home-and-garden shop Pigment, an early player in the neighborhood resurgence, which features an indoor fig tree that rises to the rafters.

And then there’s the beer.

“Beer blew it up, pretty much,” said Greg Theilmann, manager at Verbatim Books. “There are so many breweries.”

North Park has been central to San Diego’s emergence as a craft brewing capital. More than a dozen craft breweries and pubs fill the area, sprinkled among restaurants, independent retailers and cocktail lounges like Botanica, Seven Grand and 619 Spirits North Park. Near the hipster-magnet corner of 30th and Upas, Bluefoot draws dive-bar aficionados and soccer fans.

Still, North Park and its sidekick South Park don’t attract hordes of tourists the way the beaches and Balboa Park do. When you show up, you’ll be joining plenty of savvy locals, especially along pedestrian-friendly 30th Street and University Avenue.

If you’re coming from Los Angeles, the increasingly lively commercial strips and buffed-up bungalow blocks might remind you of Virgil Village or Atwater Village. But North Park is its own place. Here’s a guide to get you started.