Coronado Beach

For forty summers, Coronado’s Tent City housed thousands of vacationers in red-and-white striped canvas tents, a democratic alternative to the opulent Hotel del Coronado just up the beach. At $4.50 a week, you got a furnished tent with electric lights, a bed, and a washstand, its floor laid with matting over boards, even if the streets outside stayed dirt. Today, those same candy-striped colors appear on the hotel’s iconic beach lounges, echoing a time when glamping meant shared bathrooms down at the communal bath house, but the Pacific was just as close.

Tent City was never just tents. At its peak it ran its own restaurants, a soda fountain, a grocery store, a small hotel called the Arcade, a theatre, a dance pavilion, a merry-go-round, and even its own police department and daily newspaper, a fully functioning seasonal town built entirely around the idea that the beach shouldn’t only belong to whoever could afford the Del. It lasted until 1938, when the land gave way to development, today it’s the site of the Coronado Shores condos, a permanent, private footprint replacing what was once, for a few months every year, wide open to anyone with $4.50.