By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.— I'm not sure if anyone clued in the passengers aboard Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's Monarch of the Seas or aboard Holland America Line's Veendam when those two ships came into port today, but the biggest bargain on San Diego on Tuesdays is Balboa Park.

As the 1,400-acre park's landlord, the City of San Diego requires the numerous museums occupying the cultural heart of San Diego to apportion the first four Tuesdays of any month in such a way that on any given Tuesday, some of the museums are open for free.   If you visited Balboa Park on four Tuesdays in a row, and you were quick about it, you could visit every museum in San Diego without having to pay anything for the privilege.

The museums occupy the refurbished and rebuilt Spanish Colonial buildings that served as the chief venues at world expositions conducted  in 1915 and 1935 when San Diego was trying to draw attention to itself and its deep water port as an ideal area for handling imports and exports for countries on the rim of the Pacific Ocean.
 
Set among luscious gardens, broad walkways, reflecting pools and fountains, the museums offer an ever-changing tableau of exhibitions that keep San Diegans and visitors coming back each year by the millions.

Free today were the exhibitions at the Museum of Photographic Arts and at the San Diego
  Pedestrians pass between reflecting pool and Casa de Balboa

Museum of History, which are both housed in the Casa de Balboa. In each museum, there were Jewish threads sewn into the tapestries of the exhibitions.  

For example, the photographic arts museum's current exhibitions show the work of some photographers who were early to use the 35 millimeter camera, including Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon, both of whom were German Jews.  That exhibit is a companion to the currently featured exhibit, "Breaking the Frame: Pioneering Women in Photojournalism," in which the public is treated to a representative sampling of the works of photographers Therese Bonney, Margaret Bourke-White, Esther Bubley, Olga Lander, Hansel Mieth and Grace Robertson.  

Several of Bourke-White's photos deal with subjects of direct Jewish interest such as a Talmud class in Czechoslovakia in 1938; cheering inmates following the liberation of a concentration camp at the end of World War II, and a former concentration camp inmate grieving near an emaciated corpse at a Nazi work camp in Leipzig. 


Margaret Bourke-White, Concentration Camp Internees Cheer, 1945, gelatin silver print, courtesy of Cam and Wander Garner, copyright  (c) Getty-Time/Life, is included in exhibit  at the Museum of Photographic Arts through Sept. 24

Bourke-White, in 1936, became the first woman to become a staff photographer for Life, and Mieth followed her to the magazine two years later. Bonney took World War II era photographs in France; Lander accompanied Soviet troops through much of the war, while Bubley and Robertson took highly evocative photographs of every day life respectively in the United States and England.

In the companion exhibit, at which Eisenstaedt's photograph of crewmen tethered to hooks atop a Zeppelin in flight over the Atlantic, graces the entry way, we see the great talent with which both Eisenstaedt and Salomon documented European life in the years before Adolf Hitler's election as Germany's chancellor in 1933 and the imposition of the anti-Semitic laws that led to Eisenstaedt's exile and Salomon's murder in Auschwitz.

Among works by Eisenstaedt in the exhibit running through September 17  are "Paris Street Musicians, 1930" and "Destitute Man Near Les Halles District,  Paris, 1931" as well as "Benito Mussolini Giving Speech From Balcony, Venice, Italy, 1934,"  The latter shows the Italian dictator raising his hand, with a finger pointing skyward, speaking from a draped balcony.  On the adjoining balcony are soldiers, paying various varieties of attention to Il Duce.  Above the soldiers in a strange juxtaposition are figures of  women carved into the building.

Salomon's works are represented by a series of photographs capturing Heinrich Bruning, chancellor of Germany under the Weimar Republic, at various diplomatic meetings in Europe before and after he was in power.  The most interesting of these shows Bruning with his back to the camera, gesturing, as he makes a point in a seemingly intense conversation with cigar-smoking Edouard Herriot, the former French prime minister.

Down the hall from MOPA is the entrance to the Museum of San Diego History which also has several concurrent exhibitions, including an imaginative one introducing children through a variety of interactive exhibits to the history of Balboa Park.

The exhibit, "From Blueprints to Buildings: San Diego Architecture" includes among numerous other examples, three pieces of architecture with distinct Jewish histories: the Louis Bank of Commerce, built in 1888; the Melville Klauber home, constructed in 1909, and the Salk Institute, designed in 1965. 

"Entrepreneur Isidor Louis hired architect Gustavus Clements and John Stannard to design the first granite building in the area," according to the museum.  "The structure housed the Bank of Commerce and later an Oyster Bar which was a favorite of Wyatt Earp.  The upper floors later became the Golden Poppy Hotel, a notorious brothel.  In 1947, Ratner Electric moved into the building, establishing it as a house of a thousand lights."

Louis and the Ratners were members of the Jewish communities of their eras, and Earp—famed as the marshal of Tombstone, Ariz., who had a shoot-out at O.K. Corral—was married in his later life to Sarah Marcus (known as Josie Earp) accounting for 

                                                                                                     Louis Bank of Commerce Building
  
why he is buried in the Northern California Jewish cemetery near Colma, despite the fact that the gun-slinging lawman was not a Jew.

The residence of Melville Klauber was designed by well-known San Diego architects Irving J. Gill and Frank B. Mead in the Banker's Hill neighborhood near downtown.  Unlike the twin-tower Louis Commercial Bank Building (seen above) the Klauber home no longer stands today.  "Melville Klauber was regarded as a businessman and civic leader," the museum's story board instructs.  "He was the son of Abraham Klauber, who began the Klauber-Wangenheim mercantile business.  Later Melville took the business over from his father..  The Klauber residence was a major turning point in Irving John Gill's career.  It was lauded as one of the finest homes in San Diego when the home was still in its planning stages."

The Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies was identified by the curators of the history exhibit as an example of an architectural style known as "brutalism."  Architect Louis I. Kahn's architectural achievement, "built on the Pacific Coast is as magnificent as the work that occurs inside the Salk Institute," in the museum's estimate. 

"The Salk Institute is as much an experience as it is a building.  Visitors enter the complex through a miniature grove of citrus trees that lead into the broad plaza between twin research and laboratory wings.  Eyes are drawn to the spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean and the coastline by a simple contemplative water feature.

"Brutalist buildings, like the Salk Institute, have a look of heavy weight and solid massiveness. Structure is emphasized or frankly exhibited. Concrete is the favorite construction material and is used as the exterior finish of the building.  Concrete block or brick may also be used.  Openings are treated as holes or slits in the solids of the walls with emphasis on deep shadows and voids."

Another example of "brutalist" architecture, according to the museum, is Qualcomm Stadium, which previously had been known first as San Diego Stadium, and later as San Diego "Jack Murphy" Stadium, after a San Diego Union-Tribune sports writer who helped to lure the Chargers football team to San Diego from Los Angeles.  More recently, naming rights  for the Super Bowl 2003 site were purchased by Qualcomm—a telecommunications company co-founded by two members of San Diego's Jewish community, Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi.