News News Columnists Logan Jenkins
Valley Center looks to regain its star quality
Valley Center History Museum
In an undated photograph, a car going toward Mount Palomar passes the "Highway to the Stars Via Valley Center" sign that local historians would like to see resurrected.
Logan JenkinsContact Reporter
Back in the good old salad days of 2006, a hundred readers helped me determine the Seven Wonders of North County.
The Man-, not the God-, made kind.
The top vote-getter, of course, was Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, the gorgeous California model home that’s the reigning adobe king of North County religious destinations. It’s located, naturally, on Mission (what else?) Avenue in Oceanside.
The runner-up (followed by the Wild Animal Park, the Lilac Road overcrossing, Highway 101, the Self-Realization Fellowship, and the Oceanside Pier) was a starry-eyed nominee that looks down upon North County from its aerie atop Palomar Mountain.
The Palomar Observatory, a cutting-edge instrument of astronomy since it was dedicated in 1948, was for 20 years before that eye-opening day a painstaking work in progress.
In 1928, George Ellery Hale, the founder of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, secured funding for his visionary project from the Rockefeller Foundation: A 200-inch telescope that would dwarf any other in the world, an endeavor that many science historians refer to as the “moon shot” of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
It was, however, something of a star-crossed endeavor.
In 1934, a 20-ton mirror cast by a New York foundry was delivered by special train to Caltech in Pasadena. (A first attempt cracked in cooling.)
For the next 13 years, with the notable exception of the war years, workmen ground and polished the slab into a near-perfect parabolic sculpture valued at $600,000 that, when finally finished, reduced the 20-ton slab by more than 5 tons. It’s estimated the expert crafting required 180,000 man hours.
Meanwhile, the problem of getting the $600,000 mirror from Caltech to its home atop Palomar was solved in the mid-1930s with the construction of a winding mountain road eventually dubbed the “Highway to the Stars.”
In late November 1947, the finished mirror was loaded onto an 18-wheel vehicle that, on the first day, made its way with a police convoy from Pasadena to Escondido, reaching a top speed of 15 mph.
After spending the night in the Hidden Valley, the caravan crawled through Valley Center and up to the domed home that had been waiting for its crucial component for years.
“Safely completing a ticklish 160-mile trip by trailer from Pasadena, Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch mirror arrived here late this morning — inching over the last miles of twisting mountain road in heavy mist, bursts of hail and flurries of sleet.
“Tonight, man’s most ambitious astronomical undertaking — to peer a billion light-years into space from this mile-high mountain 64 miles northeast of San Diego — is only a step from fulfillment.”
Down in Valley Center, the passage of the mirror through town had been the biggest show in the universe.
What’s now known as Valley Center Road was packed with looky-loos gawking at the mind-bending cargo. (Palomar would remain the world’s largest working telescope in the world until 1993.)
In the great American tradition of hitching commercial wagons to shooting stars, “Highway to the Stars Via Valley Center” signs sprang up from Palomar through Valley Center.
According to the Valley Center History Museum, “The name … caught on and eventually appeared on maps. Retail merchants began using that phrase as their street address, and continued the practice well into the 1950s.
“Over time, some of the official County signs were removed for road widening; others were taken by souvenir hunters. Today, the sign exists only in historic photographs.”
To honor the 70th anniversary of the passage, the museum is proposing that a series of throwback Highway to the Stars signs be installed along Valley Center Road, museum historian Bob Lerner informs me. The Valley Center Community Planning Group has given its blessing. A request has been sent to the county Department of Public Works.
This should be a no-brainer.
The brown historic signs commemorating the original routes of Highway 101 and 395 are grace notes in the symphony that’s North County.
For heaven’s sake, why not make similar music with the Highway to the Stars
The “Big Eye,” as the observatory was called in the ‘40s, is still wide open, a bona fide wonder.
Why not let Valley Center once again enjoy, as it did for more than a decade, a little of Palomar’s star quality.
Firefighters launch air assault on Holy fire; thousands of homes threatened
Trump again calls for NFL players to be suspended
Hearings for President Trump's Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh to start early next month