Take a ride down the elevators at 202 C Street, San Diego's City Hall, and you'll end up in the basement. Then walk down a long white hallway that's very clean and through a nondescript door.
You'll end up in a magical place filled with boxes and boxes of City Council resolutions, records of property ownership, old cemetery maps and ordinances from the 1800s—back when Mexico owned San Diego.
This is the city of San Diego's archives.
"We have a lot of cool stuff down here that the public had never laid eyes on," said Sheila Beale, the deputy director of Archives and Records Management for the city.
What's the history of the archives?
The city's charter back in 1850 states that the city clerk is responsible for the archives.
"But our humble beginnings didn't really start until around 1980," Beale said.
At that time, the city clerk, along with students from San Diego State University, started going through storage and pulling photos, maps and documents to be stored.
"But then the city kind of hit on hard times as cities often do, and archives is not the top of the priority list," Beale said. "So a lot of these precious, fragile, historical materials just lay dormant in the cold vault area."
That's a cold vault, like a giant refrigerator for storing documents. More on that later.
A lot of the materials were deteriorating, which is when Liz Maland, the city clerk, stepped in, with a proposal to the City Council back in 2013.
"I was able to present it in a budget presentation, it was the first time people were like, oh, that's interesting," Maland said.
She was able to market the archiving program by reminding people what the city had, basically in its basement, that was forgotten about.
"That's when the light went on for me and I was like, people can't care about something unless they know it exists," she said.
In 2013, she got a $50,000 a year budget to preserve and store historic documents, but also to make the archives accessible to the public. People can either make an appointment to visit the archives or can look at a lot of the material online. About half of her budget goes to paying a part-time archivist, Jerry Handfield.
"All civilizations have had record keeping, the only difference was in those days record keepers were among the highest paid officials," Handfield said.
"Not anymore," Maland added with a laugh.
What's the oldest thing in the archives?
Handfield said he thinks the oldest thing in the archives is a book of ordinances from 1817 when Mexico governed San Diego.
He showed it off, paging through a large book filled with cursive handwriting in Spanish. Some of the pages had been singed by fire.
"Each page was individually treated, wrapped in Mylar, encapsulated," Handfield said.
What else is in the city's archives?
Census books from the 1800s, cemetery records, including Chinese and Masonic burial grounds, and books recording property ownership—all written out by hand.
Some of these are stored in the cold vault—a special refrigerated room kept at 68 degrees. Paper stored at 68 degrees lasts twice as long as when it's stored at 72 degrees, said Patrice Percy, who works for the city clerk's office.
The vault is filled with stacks of boxes, and each of those is filled with endless pieces of paper. There are also leather bound books that look like they belong on the set of Game of Thrones filled with handwritten council resolutions.
In fact, they have 306,964 council resolutions, and that only goes up to 2017.
Plus, old maps from the 1800s when San Diego's city center was in Old Town, and none of downtown San Diego existed yet.
City staff are also working to scan and categorize more than 1 million negatives and photos—they have about 50,000 done so far—which are searchable on the city's website.
You can also view online street views from the 1970s and search mayoral artifacts and gifts for mayors back through the 1950s.
Why do we have to keep all this stuff?
Part of the point of the city's archives is to preserve the historic items so they don't deteriorate further. But another part is actually storing the documents that are essential to the city government.
"Every government has records, dictators have records, kings have records, but in a democracy, we want to make them accessible," Handfield said. "It enables people to have trust in their institutions. They trust the City Council if they can see the records the City Council is seeing, too."
The City Clerk's office works with every council office and every city department to let them know what records need to be stored and for how long. Last year they began using a master records schedule that lays out how long documents should be kept.
And yes, they keep paper copies of everything, said Maland, the city clerk.
"I'm the official record keeper for the city and I'm tasked with keeping things forever and ever. Amen," she said. "The only way I can guarantee that you as a citizen will be able to access that material is if I'm keeping it in paper form in an environment that is conducive to long term storage, and on microfilm."
She said the city is currently looking into storing things electronically, but there are a lot of technological requirements. It would have to be very secure and guarantee that as technologies change, people in the future could still access the records.
"I came across an old floppy disk at home recently, I have no way of accessing the material that's on there," she said, as an example.
Won't the city run out of storage space?
In addition to the basement of City Hall, the city's archives fill multiple cold vaults in different locations downtown. That, and a site underground in the salt mines in Kansas. Yes, really.
"Part of the records management program requires that departments identify those documents that are necessary to get city government back up and running in the event of a natural disaster," Maland said.
Those vital records, as they're called, are stored in Kansas because it's cheap and far away.
Are San Diego's archives special?
They are according to Maland, and she has been recognized for her work.
The California Historical Records Advisory Board awarded her the "Archival Award of Excellence" last year, and the Save Our Heritage Organisation gave her the People in Preservation Award in 2017.
Back to the history
Tucked away near his office in the City Hall basement, archivist Handfield points out a banner displaying a quote from the City Council minutes back in 1850.
"They designated an iron safe to be appropriated to the clerk for the safekeeping of the city archives," he said.
Today, the storage is a little bigger than one iron safe, but the idea is basically the same.
