Yesterday I went down with my family to celebrate my birthday (which was on the 23rd) down in Balboa Park. They had apparently never heard of this place before, so having gone once before I thought I’d introduce it to them. This place was built back in 1915 for the Panama-California Exposition and features mostly Spanish Colonial Revival architecture along with more modern buildings from later expansions. Today it serves as a cultural center for San Diego and is basically this city’s version of New York’s Central Park.
When we first arrived, a woman with jumper cables asked us if we could help her restart her car. It didn’t work and even though our door was open and there were many other parking spots available at the time, a middle aged man was insistent on parking in the spot next to us as we were attempting to help out the woman with her car. After this little bit of madness in the parking lot, we walked over to the park itself and started with our first museum of the day.
The Museum of Man
My older brother made the comment that this looked more like a church rather than a museum so he thought it contradictory that this would be displaying scientific things inside. It’s a beautiful building with a facade reminiscent of the Spanish Baroque movement known as “churrigueresque.” Inside features some giant plaster reproductions of Mayan stele which might sound unimpressive though they have history in their own right, being over a hundred years old.
The Early Man and Egyptian exhibits upstairs feature some cool facts and relics though the presentations feel a tad outdated. It’s not a big deal though as long as everything being shown is factual and scientifically verified. I enjoyed this one skull that you could play with like a nutcracker in the Early Man exhibit and a headless mummy on display in the Egyptian exhibit. There is also a Cannibalism exhibit across from the museum that was pretty interesting. Inside is a shipwreck presentation where we played a game of drawing straws to see who survives that I thought was fun. Definitely worth a visit.
Air and Space Museum
After lunch we made this place our next museum. The architecture is built in the sleek Streamline Moderne style of the 1930s and is actually pretty big inside. Right when you go through the front door, you see a model of the Spirit of St. Louis with an old 70s-style animatronic of Charles Lindbergh himself. My mom was creeped out by it, commenting that it was staring right at her. I made the comment that it looked like something out of a Kraftwerk music video, so I thought it had a certain strange charm to it.
Next to that is a cool space exhibit with a moon rock, astronaut suits, and the Apollo 9 command module known as “Gumdrop.” Inside features a lot of paintings of aerospace pioneers like the Wright Brothers and even more recent names like Richard Branson. There are many historic planes going back to World War I and through the Cold War, though there isn’t as much information about more up-to-date technology from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars for example as I would have liked. Perhaps they wouldn’t have as much space left for them, but what they do have is still fascinating to see nonetheless.
Timken Museum of Art
Probably the most timeless of the museums we visited, this is a small art gallery which is free of charge. The architecture definitely stands out from the others with its 1960s modernism but somehow still works really well and looks really charming in its own right. There are two wings, one on both sides, with a central core of sofas in the middle as you walk through the entrance. One wing features post-Renaissance art which includes work from John Singleton Copley, Anthony van Dyck, and the only Rembrandt painting to reside in San Diego (that of St. Bartholomew).
The next wing featured more religious art from what looked like the Renaissance and Middle Ages, including these Russian Orthodox icons which I thought were beautiful, particularly the large one in the middle. There was also a special exhibit featuring impressionist artwork from Monet of the French coastline, however I was not allowed to take pictures of it. Our time at the museum all-in-all was short but sweet.
Botanical Building
This is one of the most beautiful and photogenic buildings in all of Balboa Park, it’s really one of the more iconic structures in all of San Diego as a matter of fact. Like the Timken Museum of Art, the Botanical Building is free of charge to enter and features an indoor garden. A lot of the plants seem a bit interchangeable and green so it was a little hard to make out distinct kinds of plants. We really liked this one exhibit which featured leaves that you could rub between your fingers and left behind a strong scent like mint for example. It looks like the Venus fly traps were killed by people trying to feed them (perhaps throwing pennies in their mouths) so there were signs telling people not to feed them and were possibly being replaced. I didn’t take any pictures inside but this is still a nice place to potentially take someone on a date.
Natural History Museum
The last museum we visited that day was the Museum of Natural History. There were cool exhibits revolving around what this area used to look like back in prehistoric times and fossils from the Ice Age, including those of mammoths and giant sloths. One exhibit I thought was interesting was their collection of shelved specimens of animals being put on display. The collection of animals that stood out to me was this group of morpho butterflies which had wings that appeared to be almost holographic in nature! They were really quite stunning.
Like with a few of the other museums some of the presentations were a little outdated, these computer displays for example showing information about earthquakes in the Pacific Rim going no further than 2005. The last thing we did before leaving was seeing this 3D show about the Galapagos Islands. I was surprised they didn’t talk about the finches as much, knowing how important they were for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but it was still entertaining to watch (despite this little kid who kept yelling about every little thing on screen behind me).
Overall I had a great day with my family and I’m glad I got to show them something new that we could maybe return to one day. I certainly would love to come down here more often whenever I’m in the San Diego area.
Colby's Thoughts 