San Diego's Loma Portal neighborhood is not the city's oldest stand of houses;  nor indeed, is it rich old hardwood growth.  There are pristine groves of bungalows elsewhere in San Diego comparable to the best in the Bay Area,  and noble forests of mostly unaltered late Loma Portal is one of the most interesting because of the variety of styles within it and the care with which the neighborhood has been kept.  Various parts of it were built (after being platted in the 1920s) through the 1950s, with the houses ranging from quite small single-story bungalows up to variants of the American four-square.   The stylistic variation of the houses, achieved despite modest building costs in difficult times, and the bravery and intelligence of some owners and builders that make the neighborhood.  The earliest houses one can see are a few rambling beach/country houses that predate the main settlement, dating  around 1910.  There are then a series of bungalows in the following styles:  Tudor, Spanish Mission, Mission Revival,  Prairie, Arts and Crafts, Moderne/Art Deco, Ranch, and one lone (but splendidly landscaped) example of a Midcentury Modern glass box.

This neighborhood has an unbelievable amount of architectural detailing in the houses;  while none are landmark houses put up by plutocrats,  almost all manifest some trace of a pride in building, or perhaps better, reveal a desire to go beyond the simplest common denominator in putting the structures together.  Facades are regularly sculpted;  Modern houses have zigzag or floral art deco reliefs;  windows regularly feature complicated mullion treatments or art glass;  Many have rustic niches in the interior fireplaces of Spanish Mission houses meant perhaps to hold a family icon;  even the least complex boxes in the Ranch style exhibit interesting masonry in terms of texture, or method of laying it.  It is genuinely difficult to find a house without heart.

For those interested, Loma Portal, properly speaking, lies in the curvy pie slice bounded by Rosecrans, Nimitz, and Chatsworth Streets;  the neighborhood was and remains almost entirely residential;  it has been gnawed at around the edges a little, and the quality of the development falls off rapidly the instant one begins going downhill near Nimitz Blvd (the finest--and oldest--parts of it have streetlights on cement bases in the exact center of each intersection).