Skyline, San Diego, CA

Skyline is a small hillside part of southeast San Diego, set north of Paradise Valley Road between Encanto on the west and Lomita on the east. Its streets climb toward Skyline Drive, and on clear days the name earns itself with long views west to downtown and the bay. Homes here are mostly postwar tract houses from the 1950s and 1960s on sloping lots. Iron bars over ground-floor windows and gated driveways behind chain-link fences are a common sight. Skyline is nearly all houses, with very little commercial space inside its lines. Officer Christopher Wilson Memorial Park, known as Skyview Park until it was renamed in his memory, sits on Skyline Drive and is the one park inside the neighborhood's lines. Marie Widman Memorial Park, at the Imperial Avenue end of the neighborhood, is where a local lowrider club holds its meetups. Keiller Park and the Skyline Recreation Center are just east, and Encanto's larger parks are a short drive west. Eating out means leaving Skyline. A short drive north and west, Imperial Avenue in Encanto has The Mental Bar for lattes and breakfast burritos and Caribbean Taste for oxtail. To the east, the Lomita Village center at Jamacha Road and Cardiff Street has a grocery store and a handful of taco shops. Morse High School is just south in Bay Terraces, and the Skyline Hills Branch Library is close by on Paradise Valley Road. The Encanto/62nd Street station is the closest trolley stop, and most errands still start in the driveway. Walking is hard work here. The hills are steep, the blocks are long, and there is no full supermarket or coffee shop within the neighborhood itself. What Skyline offers instead is quiet streets and height. Stand at the top of the rise in the late afternoon and the city spreads out below, all the way to the water.