They were both ugly and magnificent. Considered by some to be an atrocity on the East San Diego landscape, others living miles around remember them as a kind of visual accompaniment to childhood. At night, their red lights, seen from a bedroom window, were as constant and mysterious as the stars that lay beyond. Three 600-foot towers arranged in a triangle in Chollas Heights dominated the nearby skyline for nearly 80 years.
It was a Navy thing. That is about all most of us knew. It was some kind of giant and super-powerful radio station that would surely toast you if you got too close. There must have been guards all around the buildings, we figured, because from those towers they were sending coded messages to submarines and stuff.
In fact, they dated back to 1916, when the radio station housed in an adjacent military building was the most powerful in North America. Service personnel working at the radio plant could enjoy recreational facilities, including the heated swimming pool fed with water used to cool the massive transmitter itself.
For the most part, the Naval Radio Transmitting Facility at Chollas Heights provided routine communication to and from shore operations and ships in the Pacific. But on December 7, 1941, word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was first flashed around the globe from those very towers. Although radio engineers would point out that the towers themselves were just support structures for a triatic array of interconnected wires, strung at the very top between them and collectively weighing more than a ton. The actual signals radiated from those wires.
At the time of their creation, these metal giants rising from open space inspired a kind of awe in the population and were a source of great pride to San Diego officialdom. On the day when initial testing of the 200-thousand-watt spark transmitter began, prominent citizens including representatives of the Chamber of Commerce gathered at the facility to hail San Diego’s role in the miracle of radio communication. Mayor Edwin Capps proclaimed, “Space has been annihilated and the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards are as one.”
In the decades that followed, the Navy experimented with different frequencies and communication modes as the work done at Chollas unquestionably contributed to advances in radio technology. But eventually the station was deemed unnecessary and too expensive, and all operations ceased on the final day of September 1992.
Three years later on Veterans Day, thousands of San Diegans gathered from rooftops in Lemon Grove to beach chairs along College Avenue, to watch as the towers were toppled by explosive charges.
Today only a top portion of one of the towers remains as an historical display near the administrative office for Naval Housing at 3251 Transmitter Road, in the very building which once housed the station itself. On weekdays, when the office is typically open, visitors can ask to see an area set aside for photos and memorabilia from the glory days of the place. My guess is, it will provide a sense of history, and, if you have been in San Diego long enough, some memories.
