North Park, San Diego Feb. 2021. The North Park sign can be seen at 30th Street and University Avenue, and this intersection is considered to be the heart of the neighborhood. In the summer of 1893, San Diego merchant Joseph Nash sold 40 acres (16 ha) of land northeast of Balboa Park to James Monroe Hartley, who wished to develop a lemon grove. The Hartley family began the arduous process of clearing the land to prepare the earth for
the grove, but providing the fledgling trees with proper irrigation was always a problem. Barrels of water had to be hauled from downtown San Diego up a wagon trail that eventually was called Pershing Drive.

In 1911, Hartley's eldest son Jack and brother-in-law William Jay Stevens developed the plot into one of San Diego's early residential and
commercial districts. After first establishing Stevens & Hartley, North Park's first real estate firm, in 1905, Jack and William built North
Park's first "high rise" commercial building, the Stevens building, on the northwest corner of 30th Street and University Avenue (today's "Western Dental" building) in 1912. "Thirtieth & University" became North Park's symbolic place name, and within 10 years, this became the heart of the community.
Later in the 1910s, North Park became one of the many San Diego neighborhoods connected by the Class 1 streetcars and an extensive
San Diego public transit system that was spurred by the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 and built by John D. Spreckels. These streetcars became a fixture of this neighborhood until their retirement in 1949.
North Park was the site of the crash of PSA Flight 182, California's deadliest aviation accident to date