“I’m getting tired of handling so much money.”

Alonzo Erastus Horton reportedly made this statement while selling the two-hundred and twenty-six blocks of what is now downtown San Diego. And no wonder. His outlay for eight-hundred acres purchased at an auction in 1867 totaled only thirty-three cents an acre. Two years later he paid $4,000 for a one-hundred and sixty acre parcel needed to sew up the section known as the Horton Addition.