Women of Bankers Hill: A Self-Guided Walking Tour in San Diego Women of Bankers Hill is a first-timer's flagship walk through the residential blocks on the canyon rim just north of downtown San Diego, a few minutes west of Balboa Park. This tour covers nine stops inside about a mile, from the three garden houses Alice Lee built on Seventh Avenue to the Marston House at the north end, with Granite Cottage, the Wednesday Club, and the Coulter House along the way. The subject is architecture, property, and civic power in San Diego, at the addresses where women held all three. About This San Diego Walking Tour In May 1906, Alice Lee deeded one of the three Seventh Avenue houses she had built to Katherine Teats, the woman she lived with for decades. Lee had come to San Diego in 1902 out of a family with deep real estate experience, and she bought the land, commissioned a principal residence and two smaller cottages around one shared garden, and rented the cottages out. A census taker recorded Lee as Head of Household in 1930, and Teats as Partner. Those three houses are the core of a nine-stop walk through how women in Bankers Hill used land, design, and organization to shape San Diego. Hazel Wood Waterman reached architecture without an architecture degree, beginning as the closely involved client on her own family home and ending as the named designer of a house and garden a few blocks away. Kate Sessions graduated from the University of California in 1881, having written a graduation essay on natural science as a field for women's work, and she spent the career that followed changing what grows in this city. Alice Klauber painted, collected, and organized exhibitions, and she helped build the institutions where San Diego's decisions about art were made. Dr. Charlotte Baker, the city's first woman physician, presided over the Equal Suffrage Association through the 1911 campaign in which California women won the vote by a narrow margin, and her diaries from those years survive. The Route The stops sit within about a mile of one another, on the blocks between Fourth and Seventh Avenues. Alice Lee Residence , the main house of a three-house compound built by a developer who lived in one and collected rent on the other two.Katherine Teats Cottage , deeded to Teats in 1906, shaped by Hazel Wood Waterman's design work and by Kate Sessions's planting in the shared garden.Alice Lee Cottage , the smallest house in the group and the clearest place to see how the rent and the improvements worked over time.Granite Cottage , the house Hazel Wood Waterman and her husband Waldo Sprague Waterman commissioned, and where she learned the work she later practiced professionally.Wednesday Club , founded by its members in 1895 as a literary organization and given a permanent building the women of the club paid for and owned.Ackerman House & Garden , where Waterman worked as the architect of the house and of the garden she shaped to its slope, light, and climate.Coulter House , the large Second Avenue residence Lucy Coulter commissioned from architect Carleton Winslow Sr. in 1915.Marston House , the family home approached through Anna Gunn Marston, whose household and social work sat underneath the public career her husband George Marston is remembered for.Lucy Killea House on Brant Street, listed on the City's historic register because of the public career Lucy Killea ran out of it, in local government and California state politics. You'll Learn About… How Alice Lee ran three houses and one garden as working property, living in the principal residence, renting the two cottages, and drawing income from them year after year.Why two architects' names, William Sterling Hebbard and Hazel Wood Waterman, are both attached to the 1912 house at 3226 Curlew Street, with only one of them on the City of San Diego's historic register.How Hazel Wood Waterman assembled a professional career out of art study at the University of California, close work on her own house, published writing, and drafting, at a time when institutions counted none of that as professional preparation.How much organized local work sat underneath the narrow 1911 California suffrage win, from Dr. Charlotte Baker and the Equal Suffrage Association in San Diego.How Letitia Lovett rescued a Victorian house from demolition in 1911, buying the roughly 1890 structure on the Fourth Avenue cable line and having the whole building moved to Walnut Street.What the women of the Wednesday Club did with money, property, and their own creative labor after 1895 to turn a literary society into a civic institution with a headquarters of its own. Who It's For This is a first-timer's flagship tour, well suited to anyone drawn to architecture, women's history, or the practical question of how a neighborhood gets financed and built. The houses stand close together, so you can cover the whole through line in an hour or two on foot. Bankers Hill is a short walk from Balboa Park and downtown, which makes it an easy addition to a day of things to do in San Diego. Practical Details The route is about a mile through the Bankers Hill blocks between Fourth and Seventh Avenues and takes roughly ninety minutes at an easy pace, longer with time spent looking at the gardens. A natural place to begin is the group of Lee and Teats houses on Seventh Avenue, though the stops carry no fixed order and you can take them in any direction. The audio is self-guided, so you set the pace and pause wherever you want. These are private homes, seen from the public sidewalk, and a few blocks pitch steeply toward the canyon. Start Your San Diego Walking Tour Download the app to take the Women of Bankers Hill self-guided walking tour in San Diego, and stand in front of the houses while you hear how each one came to be built.
