Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) is a coming-of-age film adapted from a book by Cameron Crowe, who went undercover at Clairemont High School in San Diego and wrote about his experiences.

San Diego was once known as the Tuna Capital of the World. At its peak in the early 1970s, the harbor was littered with gargantuan tuna boats, some with helicopters on the top deck for spotting fish. The industry employed over 4,000 people, making it the city's third-largest employer behind the Navy and aerospace, but the last of the canneries shut down in the early 1980s due to rising costs.

The team's original owner was C. Arnholt Smith, a prominent San Diego businessman whose interests included banking, tuna fishing, hotels, real estate and an airline. In 1979, Smith was convicted of embezzlement of $8.9 million and tax fraud, involving his sale of the Padres. He served eight months in a county minimum-security Work Furlough Center in 1984 and 1985 before his sentence was reduced due to his poor health.

In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain, and San Diego became part of the Mexican territory of Alta California, a status it would retain until 1848 when San Diego and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and became part of the United States.

In the early part of the 20th century, San Diego hosted the World's Fair twice: the Panama-California Exposition (1915) and the California Pacific International Exposition (1935). Both expositions were held in Balboa Park. Many of the Spanish/Baroque-style buildings that were built for those expositions remain to this day as central features of the park, and the menagerie of exotic animals featured at the 1915 exposition provided the basis for the San Diego Zoo.

Housing more than 3,700 animals from 650 different species, the San Diego Zoo is one of the largest zoological parks in the world.

The bridge rests on 30 towers across the bay, but these aren't ordinary bridge towers. They are supported by a tall and tapered arch, meant to mimic the appearance of the Spanish mission church arches that dominate Southern California. In this way, the bridge acknowledges the architectural history of the region, and seeks to be a part of it.