San Diego's B Street cruise terminal,
seen here in 2006.
Photo © Aaron Saunders
The beautiful city of San Diego is poised to open a new, $28-million dollar cruise terminal on its waterfront next month in a move it hopes will attract more ships to the southern California port.
While San Diego is an immensely convenient city for cruise passengers - the international airport is a mere five minutes away, and the amount of attractions in or near the city is mind-boggling - the cruise terminal situation left something to be desired.
If you were lucky, you got to embark via the B Street Pier, a 130,000 square-foot converted cotton warehouse that hadn't seen a major refurbishment since its conversion in 1985.
If you were unlucky, and more than one ship was in port, embarkation was conducted in "the tents" adjacent to the B-Street pier. Large, white temporary tents served as check-in areas for embarking passengers and could be stiflingly hot on a warm day, or miserably damp on a cold one.
With the opening next month of the new Broadway Pier, the tents will be gone forever, replaced with a modern, 52,000-square foot structure featuring blue-tinted windows and a unique saw-tooth roof design that will be capable of accommodating one cruise ship, bringing the Port of San Diego's total capacity to three vessels.
While the San Diego cruise market has taken a hit owing to increased drug and gang violence in Mexican ports and general over-capacity on the Mexican Rivera runs that will see calls to the city bottom out in 2011, Port officials are confident that while the industry may be down, the new infrastructure set to open next month will help entice future calls away from the San Pedro area of Los Angeles and back to San Diego.
For more information, visit the Port of San Diego website.
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