Chollas Creek, San Diego, CA

Chollas Creek fills the southeastern edge of San Diego's City Heights, a grid of residential streets that runs from University Avenue down toward the creek channel the neighborhood is named for. It sits east of Swan Canyon and Islenair, with Colina Park across University to the north and Oak Park and El Cerrito to the east. Housing is a mix of single-family houses and multi-family buildings, the same pattern found across City Heights. Branches of the creek cut through the grid, and the stretches of open channel are what break up the rows of houses. Water shapes the outdoors here. Wightman Street Neighborhood Park was built around a stretch of Auburn Creek, one of the Chollas Creek branches, with the goal of turning a concrete drainage back into something closer to a natural creek and adding play space, trails and shade for the blocks around it. Downstream along State Route 94, a state-funded project set out to pull concrete from Chollas Creek itself and add native plants, walkways and bike paths. Swan Canyon, with its restored trail, is a short walk west. University Avenue is the commercial edge. Halal markets, Somali and East African kitchens and Mexican seafood counters share the strip. Just across University in Colina Park, Vien Dong, part of the World Foods chain of Asian supermarkets, handles a big share of the weekly shopping, and Northgate Market at 54th Street is the other big stop. University Avenue carries several bus lines, and riders can connect at the freeway-level transit stations on State Route 15 a few miles west. Drivers use 54th Street and SR 94 to get downtown or out toward La Mesa. Most of what Chollas Creek offers sits on its edges, so evenings out usually mean heading to University or beyond. The pull is the creek work, which is slowly turning concrete drainage channels into green places to walk.