Rueben H. Fleet Science Center, San Diego

Pity the San Diegans. They must live year-round in a narrow temperature range of 60 to 75 degrees F (occasionally suffering the discomfort of 55 or 85-degree anomalies) and endure 10.41 inches of rainfall each winter. They are fated to wait perpetually in vain to experience the romance of snowdrifts, tornados, over-the-top humidity, hail, spring sleet and other seasonal extremes.

To make the best of a bad lot, they console themselves with a lot of shallow distractions – 70 miles of beaches, a beautiful bay, easy access to Mexico and one particularly seductive diversion, 1,400-acre Balboa Park, a eucalyptus-scented green lung smack in the middle of town.

In 1915 the park was the site of the Panama-California Exposition, a celebration of the recent official opening of the Panama Canal and an anticipation of its salutatory effects on San Diego’s port. The city hired architect Bertram Goodhue to design the fair’s many temporary buildings. Goodhue, whose opus would come to include Park Avenue’s great Romanesque basilica, St. Bartholemew’s, the state capitol of Nebraska and the inimitable central library of Los Angeles, adapted a Spanish Colonial Revival style, whose rich, often baroque ornamentation was intended to evoke memories of California’s beginnings as a Spanish colony.

Despite the intention to tear down most of Goodhue’s buildings once the exposition ended in 1916, San Diegans liked the structures too much to see them go. So, now massed along the El Prado walkway, the main lane of the 1915 exposition, are buildings that started as ephemera but now house most of the city’s major museums.

At the western end of El Prado, in one of Goodhue’s “temporary” buildings, the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center opened in 1973 as the first Omnimax theater in the U.S. The Omnimax format, projecting images from extra-large film frames onto the inside of a large hemisphere, created a crowd-pleasing illusion of three dimensionality that was perfectly suited to the center’s role as San Diego’s premier planetarium.

With Omnimax (later, IMAX), the Fleet Center was off and running as San Diego’s most popular museum and one of the city’s top 10 attractions. Along with its IMAX theater, the center offers interactive science exhibits, lectures and guest appearances by notable scientists, party venues, planetarium shows and children’s programs. Starting January 31, 2004, the center will present Richard Scarry’s Busytown, an English-Spanish exhibit based on the wildly popular toddler and pre-K books by Richard Scarry that show the marvels of machines and technology in the workaday world.

During the Christmas season, Balboa Park offers two nights of free access to its museums with “Balboa Park December Nights.” This year, more than 80 museums and cultural attractions will open their doors from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., free, on Friday, December 5, and Saturday, December 6. More than 100,000 locals are expected to take advantage of the offer.

By Patrick Totty