The new Performing Arts Center is under construction at San Dieguito, scheduled to be completed this summer. The district’s contractor, Barnhart Balfour-Beatty, uncovered two architectural artifacts while grading the site for this project.
The first find was a road that runs north and south, from the entrance of the main parking lot up to the area immediately west of the locker rooms. According to J. Grace Chan, Barnhart Balfour-Beatty’s Project Manager, the road was approximately 30-35 feet across.
Perhaps the original incarnation of this road may be seen in this aerial photo of the campus, in 1937 or thereabouts. (Arrow notes road location.)
The second find was what appears to be a cistern. Chan said they initially feared it was a septic tank, which would cause all sorts of environmental issues, but after inspection and testing, the structure was classified as a cistern. She gave the dimensions as being approximately 25 feet east to west, and approximately 30 feet north to south. The shallowest end was 8 feet, and the deepest was much larger than that, going quite a ways under ground.
The construction crew knocked down as much of the cistern as possible and left the deepest parts buried. In the photos below, you may see the method of construction of the old cistern (some kind of masonry blocks, laced with a kind of rebar-like reinforcement.
This discovery added one week to the construction time line, as it took that long for the construction crew to knock down as much of the cistern as it could.