Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Chula Vista, attended a private school through 7th grade then went to Hilltop Junior and High school. I left San Diego when I was 19 to study dance in New York, I came back a few years later, then moved to San Francisco, then LA. I traveled for years as a dancer, lived in Florida for a while then came back to SD in the mid ‘90s. I got work out of town again and left for 4 years to work in the Caribbean. I’ve been back since 2000.
Besides the Weather, why do you continue to call San Diego home?
My family is in San Diego and now I have quite a few circles of friends, my women’s ritual circle, acquaintances and fans of my entertainment work here. (I’m a Michael Jackson impersonator!) I like the mix of SD both as a big small town and a small big city. There are great quality performing arts and theater, and good dance studios, which I would miss in a place more remote. I love being close to nature and there are so many lovely places to visit even just in Balboa Park, or a short drive to Cleveland National Forest. My home in South Park feels like I’m not in the middle of a city because I’m in a canyon and I love waking up to birds singing and wind in the trees!
Devra Gregory will be performing her show, Woman in the Mirror, A Dancer’s Journey, at White Box Live Arts on April 19th at 7:30 pm. There will definitely be some MJ love so get your tickets in advance!
Where did you grow up?
San Carlos was where I did my growing up and schooling but I spent most of my free time running around East County, getting into the scary kind of trouble, fighting off boredom and waiting for the day I could get the hell out. At 18 I moved to New York for college, all set to light the literary world on fire, and all I ever wrote about was East County. Go figure. You only learn how much a place has defined you after you’ve left for its opposite.
Besides the Weather, why do you continue to call San Diego home?
When I came back here in 2008, I expected the trip to be a brief stopover between overseas deployments. I was an aide worker with the UN back then, after I found the hard way that art alone rarely pays the bills. Some of my writer friends and I began staging storytelling shows to tickle our egos, and we must have hit a nerve because the audiences came and kept coming, growing bigger than we were prepared to stay on top of. We thought about creating a collective, putting our muscle behind supporting what we believe is an arts and culture renaissance taking place in San Diego. Creatives were forging the city’s identity and painting it as more than just a theme park for the military. Around that time, some guy at a party said to me that it was a good idea but it would never work here. That’s what really sold me on creating So Say We All. Turns out, he was wrong, I was right.
Photo by Rachel Bellinsky.
Check our our calendar for monthly So Say We All events.
Photo: Marissa Parsons Photography
When did you move to San Diego? Why?
I moved to San Diego in 2004, immediately after graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I drove out with my brother and Dad, and they dropped me off with two high school friends who were already living here in Ocean Beach. I moved out for a change of pace from the East Coast and originally only planned on staying for a year. The day I moved in, there was a pizza shop opening on my street, so I walked in and applied for a job. The owner questioned my motives after seeing my engineering resume, but I ensured him that this was exactly what I was looking for. The next three months were highly enjoyable and consisted of slinging pizzas, and helping to build their business. At one point, a guy from Booz Allen Hamilton came in to order, we struck up a conversation, and he ended up hiring me. I tried to work the pizza joint part time, but eventually phased out to focus on focus on management consulting for the next three years. A year into it, I started StayClassy on the side with a few friends.
Besides the Weather, why do you continue to call San Diego home?
Our company, StayClassy has been headquartered here since 2006. I’ve also since started a family here as well, and had a baby boy named Roen last October. I view San Diego as one of the most up and coming cities in the country, and the technology startup scene, of which we are a part, is starting to pick up. Our company takes pride in calling San Diego home, and let’s get serious, with a name like “StayClassy” we aren’t going anywhere.
Where did you grow up?
David: I grew up in Southern California. I was born in L.A. and lived there until I was 18, and then I was in Northern California and the Midwest for a while. I came back to Southern California 25 years ago, and I’ve been living in San Diego for the past 16 years.
Pete: I was born and raised in Cuba and came to the United States by myself at age 13 in 1961.
When did you move to San Diego, and why?
David: I’ve had a love affair with San Diego for most of my life. My dad had a business down here, he was running a steel mill in Mexicali. When I was very young, we lived in either Mexicali or Calexico, and in the summers we had a place in Point Loma. My folks split and I ended up moving to L.A., but my dad stayed in San Diego. So I had been visiting San Diego in various forms for 50 years.
Pete: I lived in Florida and got an engineering degree from the University of Florida. Then, for a while, I was in business with my father and I decided the state of Florida wasn’t big enough for both of us. So I opened a map of the United States and I had three criteria: it had to be warm, it had to be on the ocean, and it had to be as far from South Florida as possible. And guess what? That was San Diego. I came here in 1973 and I’ve been here all along, doing projects throughout the US and Latin America. I lived in Bankers Hill for 15 Years.
Besides the weather, why do you continue to call San Diego home?
David: This is a city that has great natural gifts, but it also has the potential to become more than just beauty. We believe that because it’s a relatively young city, there’s huge potential and opportunity for people to influence its trajectory. It’s very motivating to have a chance to participate in the maturation of a city that I think can be a model for 21st century, creative, economic development. It has great intellectual and creative horsepower. Sometimes we’re not all working together, but with I.D.E.A. District, we think we found a way to get all of that horsepower working together and we think we can make a difference in the way that this city grows.
Pete: I’ve been here since 1973, so I’m woven into the fabric of the community. I have designed and built many institutions in San Diego – buildings in San Diego State, UCSD, power plants, hospitals – and I’m very involved in community service. It’s a wonderful, unique city. We are a bi-national region and we’re at the doorsteps of the Pacific region – it’s very local and very international at the same time.
When did you move here and why?
When did you move to the city and why?
The decision to move me here in the beginning was not mine obviously, but I support the decision retrospectively. When it became my choice later on in life (circa 2002 after some time away), I knew there was no other place I wanted to be. Sure, free rent for a few months at my parents’ helped, but when my friend toured me around and caught me up on the creative bloom occurring in neighborhoods like North Park and Hillcrest, this new version of San Diego I was seeing really felt like home, perhaps even more so than before. That sense of belonging and the feeling of community I experience here have not faded and the urge to jump to other flourishing cities like Portland or San Francisco has never grown compelling, despite my love for them and all they have to offer.
I’ve always really appreciated San Diego’s ability to stay fun and relevant, yet simultaneously grounded and down to earth. We seem to be able to match much of the creativity and ambition of many larger, perhaps better known cultural cities, but we tend not to take ourselves too seriously and this keeps the city from consuming itself and becoming tragically hip or ridiculous. Perhaps it’s that bit of beach culture permeating at all times that continually insulates the city and keeps it casual, no matter how adventurous or bold we are at the exact same time. It’s a very comfortable environment for me.
Besides the weather, why do you continue to call San Diego home?
Given this week is San Diego Beer Week, its pretty hard not to mention that first and foremost. Even without this ten-day, “week-long” blowout, I’d already be mentioning that the city’s food and drink are a major force in my decision to be here, but it’s inescapably clear this time of the year. San Diego is the heart of the craft beer renaissance, and I feel very lucky to be here witnessing it. I sense it as being very historically and culturally significant.Besides the city’s talented brewers who inspire me year-round, there are many local chefs and restaurateurs here that capture my heart with our classic, big and bold west coast flavors. Combine those huge flavors with some of the best beers in the world and produce that can be easily sourced locally, and you have a pretty rare and dynamic combination. It’s also getting easier and easier to dine artfully here as a conscious consumer regardless of your particular inspiration (vegetarian/vegan, organic, local, etc.), and that’s very exciting to me. We’re becoming more demanding as consumers, both in the sophistication of our palates and in our awareness of a larger perspective. I can’t see myself leaving because I really want to stick around to see where this all goes.I also have a special connection to the music scene in San Diego, with its subtle yet consistently significant place in punk and rock history. We’ve had some incredible musicians and bands call our city home and create a great place to see live music, even if on a whim.
And although I can’t mention the weather, let’s just say I love the fact that I can regularly play Frisbee outdoors, and easily maintain a raised bed of veggies and homegrown hop vines.
Where did you grow up?
Born and raised in beautiful Escondido. Only lived in one house, with one address and one phone number until college.
Why did you move closer to the city?
I have always loved cities. Studying architecture in Berkeley and Florence, Italy completely sealed the deal. When Kara, my wife, and I graduated from college we headed for the Big City, renting a bootlegged loft at 13th & F where our son John-Paul was born. An incredible opportunity came up to purchase our first home, a 5,800 square foot, dilapidated warehouse on the reincarnation block at 10th & K, where our oldest daughter, Madeira, was born. My dad had just retired as an elementary school teacher, and he has an awesome set of tools so we put them to work with copious amounts of elbow grease, rehabbing the circa 1921 motor pool brick building into a spacious loft for our family, plus two rentals.
We felt like pioneers since there were no families with young children living downtown (at least voluntarily) at the time. We had a swing hanging from the 22-foot tall ceilings, played rousing games of indoor Wiffle ball, and saved up for our big annual splurge, a 14-foot tall, Noble Fir Christmas tree. We installed kid carriers on the backs of our bikes and rode all over downtown. Our children felt like landed gentry. They learned to swim in the swanky tropical paradise called the Marriott pooland joined the elite of downtown’s homeless at the Nordstrom café promptly at 7 pm, where we enjoyed severely discounted “day old” pastries and 50 cent coffee on the outdoor terrace, soaking in the impressive display of city lights and views down to Mexico.
We stayed downtown until about halfway through the construction of Petco Park, which was literally 60 feet away across the street. All the city services that ran through the footprint of the ballpark needed to be relocated. This work took place when demand was at its lowest to minimize disruptions to local businesses – from midnight to 5 am. We learned that in the still quiet of the night, city workers only drive in reverse. Kara was pregnant with our third child, Juliet, and after a couple months of sleepless nights listening to the constant chiming of the backup alarms on city vehicles we decided it was time to consider another neighborhood. Kara teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University, so that is the direction we headed and have been there ever since. The experience downtown was magical. When we go downtown, it has been so utterly transformed that it is hard to recollect how our old stomping grounds looked back in the ’90s. Absolutely amazing.
Besides the weather, why do you continue to call San Diego home?
There is a pile of reasons our family continues to call San Diego home, but here are my top 5:
1. I am one of five siblings and Kara is one of four, many who also live in San Diego. Along with both sets of parents and +/- 13 nieces and nephews, the gravitational pull of a large extended family we love and enjoy is simply too strong to abandon.
2. San Diego is an extraordinary landscape. The topography is interrupted by numerous canyons that break up the urban grid to introduce these irregular little fingers of nature throughout the city. Our house backs up to one of these canyons, where see skunks, raccoons, opossums, flocks of wild parrots and, on rare occasion, foxes and coyotes.
3. As an architect, the city is relatively new. We don’t have the heavy and oppressive historical baggage of older, more established cities like Chicago, San Francisco or New York that dictate patterns, style and solutions. There is a culture of casualness, experimentation and freedom that professionally is incredibly inspirational.
4. I love the fact that San Diego is a huge small town, and I never apologize for this condition. The place is knowable, which is an opportunity, not a fatal flaw. Attend a Padres game and you will run into several people you know. Meet someone new and toss out a few potential mutual acquaintances and there is bound to be a hit. This sense of community is what makes a place home and is the reason I will be buried in this city I love so much.
5. I can’t resist a really good taco shop, like Lucha Libre, Las Cuatro Milpas or La Fachada.
Where do you work?
Fortunately, I work from my home office and hold my meetings at Vagabond. For public events, Sam Chammas not only opens Whistle Stop, but he also gives 25% of the bar tab to support the event and non-profit groups.
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?
Because this is where I’m from… it’s as simple as that. It’s fun to watch our city learn how to be urban again, and one day East Village’s condos, Little Italy’s restaurants and Gaslamp’s bars will coalesce with a great urban waterfront to form a world-class city. Culture takes time to cultivate. I’m watching with great interest as our old surf, sun and sailing culture begins to add beer, bikes and breakfast to the mix.
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?
It is far enough away from L.A., yet close enough to Tijuana; lodged between a desert and an ocean; a whole string of friends who immerse themselves in a variety worlds…music, art, food, architecture, education, hoops, humor and life; the tourists who travel thousands of miles to visit our wee town that reckons it is a city, including the one I married; and the the Museum School, to which I seem attached at the hip.
Where did you grow up?
We grew up in Encinitas. Skating, surfing, music. Lou’s records, Rico’s Taco Shop. Pretty good place to live.
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?
For some reason San Diego is an unsuspecting city for good culture. Its rad underground music scene, great food (Mexican,) and great record shops and clothing stores put it over the top. Plus, the rich skateboard culture has always inspired us. And we know the area. It’s a good thing to know a city like this.
Its not a New York or LA, but it doesn’t need to be. Those already exist. San Diego is its own thing.
If you’re not from here, when did you move here and why?
I moved here 9 years ago in pursuit of sunshine and a college degree. Like any confused teenager who hasn’t found themselves yet, I was looking for the perfect place far from home to do just that. I’d never been to San Diego before the day I moved here, but in my mind it was heaven on Earth and, it turns out, it is.
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?
Since launching Elle Communications a few years ago, this city has also proven to be incredibly supportive of young entrepreneurs and, for that, I am eternally appreciative. I opened a second office in LA last summer and spend three days a week in the hustle and bustle of that great big city, but every Saturday morning I fall in love with San Diego all over again as I head back down South on the Surfliner. I’m quite sure that there is no better way to spend a weekend than Coronado Dog Beach, garden projects in my yard, Urban Solace or Farmhouse dinners and Sunday morning at the Hillcrest Farmer’s Market topped with a Joe’s on the Nose Aloha Latte.
Tell us where you grew up. If you’re not from here, when did you move here and why?
I started in New Jersey and got torn away to Denver when I was nine. I stayed there through Colorado State University years, one of which I spent in Tuscany, where I fell in deeply love with Italy. Now I spend as much time there as I can. San Diego + Italy = a good mix for me.
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?
We just finished working on a branding initiative for San Diego, where we did a deep-dive into this question- What makes SD special? It came down to moving the perception of San Diego as a place to “lay-back and check-out” to a place “to lay-back and CHECK-IN”. Great ideas emerge when we’re in a positive place in our minds and hearts, surrounded by beauty and friendly, collaborative people. That’s the essence of the idea behind the moniker we developed – San Diego | Where Ideas Emerge. It was special to turn our branding brains on our home. That’s also a main reason I stay here. Plus, I have a great community of creative friends that I enjoy co-creating with. That’s what led to the 100 Worlds Project sculpture show at JETT Gallery running through March 26.
Where did you grow up?
I’m from a far away land called the Midwest. I took the military enlistment route out of town, and was stationed at another location in the Midwest for several more years. After the Air Force, I did the exact opposite – I went to art school. I hung out with the art kids, sketched hairy naked girls in drawing class and found my calling as a designer – gaining the confidence to escape the landlock (both physical and mental).
Why did you move to San Diego?
To decide where I wanted to move, I got a big map of the world. I closed my eyes and threw a dart at that map. The dart landed somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. So I chose San Diego instead. I felt SD had room to grow, and room for me. Everything about it exuded positivity and a way of living I had never experienced before.
Besides the weather, why do you continue to call San Diego home?
First of all – the rent. I love the challenge it presents every month. Will I, or won’t I? Keeps me on my toes.
Actually, the first time I had ever been to San Diego – and California, even – was the day I moved here in August of 2007. I packed my car full of the only possessions I was bringing with me, and as I drove west on the 8 into SD, I felt like I was entering a paradise. Turns out I was. When you stop referring to the town you grew up as “home,” and start thinking of your current address as such – you know you’ve found your place. There’s a certain newness about San Diego that I appreciate. We’re still young, still hopeful, still growing. Still evolving. There are possibilities unseen. I relate to that, and I hope I always will.
Where did you grow up?
I am a native San Diegan and went to public schools from Kindergarten through getting a BA at UCSD.
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?
My wife Laura and our five kids, plus my and her family are all here. The San Diego/Tijuana region has tremendous potential but has never lived up to anywhere near the City it could become. We have consistently underestimated the people of this region and their desire to become a major urban area. Little Italy is one of the best examples of managed urban neighborhood redevelopment in California - and it happened here in San Diego. The weather is nice, but I actually prefer the weather in the Bay Area to San Diego.
Tell us where you grew up. If you’re not from here, when did you move
here and why?
I grew up in La Jolla after very short stints in Garden Grove and West Covina near LA, but I originated from Minneapolis, Minnesota, my birth state. My time in San Diego began when I was just four years old, my parents landing in La Jolla (or The Jewel,) where they still live to this day. Growing up in one of the most beautiful places in our county was pretty darn good. I’d say my favorite place in LJ would have to be Marine Street, a sublime beach spot! La Jolla was my youth, but the city became my playground after High School. I had a Vespa and a parka– we went everywhere! I loved growing up in LJ, but felt it was sheltered from the rest of the city, I had to get out!
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?
When I was younger, it seemed that all the creative types wanted to get out of San Diego. Move to NY, SF or LA, anywhere but here! I’ve always loved this town. It still has a charm that no other city offers. It’s a big city with a small town vibe. But change is happening and a transition from the old guard to young energy is taking over. We have so much to offer now, music, art and culture. From art galleries to new music venues, this town is hot. People are moving here and making it better. I still can’t believe we are the Micro-Brew Capitol of the country! The eye’s are on us from Beer to Wavves, as in the band, not our beaches, although they are pretty nice too…
Why do you continue to call San Diego home (Besides the Weather)?I call San Diego home in spite of the weather because it’s got big city perks but feels like a small town in a lot of ways. I can ride my bike anywhere I need to go and I see the same friends all day, all over. We don’t have a thousand amazing artists, musicians, restaurants, shops or venues, but we have some good ones and they are well-appreciated. People here are thoughtful and inspire me to do meaningful things and I don’t think that could ever be traded for cooler bars, different scenery, or anything. The tightly-knit creative community here is supportive rather than competitive and if you want to start something, people will rally behind you.
Besides the weather, why do you remain in San Diego?
Besides the weather, why do you remain in San Diego?
There’s no reason I need to be in San Diego for my work– the stuff I do (TV and books) can pretty much come from anywhere. I choose to call San Diego home because I can’t think of anywhere else I’d want to live. Oh sure, there’s a lot of places I love to visit– but in terms of a livable existence none come close. And besides the weather, San Diego is starting to become a cool place to live, eat and just hang in. Other cities are cool, but the people are often a bunch of d-bags. I really love the attitude of the people here.
