The Tom Ah Quin Building stands at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Island Avenue in San Diego’s Asian Pacific Thematic Historic District. It was built in 1930 by Thomas A. Quin, the son of Ah Quin, Chinatown’s founder and unofficial mayor.
The Quin Building is in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, an architectural style that became popular in San Diego and Southern California after the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park. According to the Historic Building plaque by its entrance, the top part of the Quin Building had two apartments, and the street level contained a storefront and storage space.
A larger structure directly attached to the north side of the building, which was also built in 1930 by Thomas Quin, is called the Casa de Thomas Addition. It has been used by various businesses over the years, including the Empire Garage and Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Company (Convair). I’ve included a photo of that plaque for you to read as well.
Today both the Quin Building and the Casa de Thomas Addition are home to downtown San Diego’s popular FLUXX Nightclub.
You can see a portrait of the Ah Quin family and learn more about San Diego’s old Chinatown by clicking here!
(If you’re curious about that very fancy looking building to the left in the above photo, that’s the Horton Grand Hotel. I blogged about it over seven years ago, when Cool San Diego Sights was just getting started. Learn about how the Horton Grand Hotel is supposedly haunted here!)
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Thank you for the post about the Chinese Museum. I saw it when it was in progress. It’s really great.
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I completely agree. It’s a wonderful little museum.
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Fun fact: I was working downtown when they reconstructed – brick-by-brick – and opened the Horton Grand Hotel. They had a contest where you were supposed to identify photographs of decorative bits of buildings in the Gaslamp area. The grand prize, which I won, was a night at the Horton Grand, a carriage ride, and dinner at Croce’s. It was fabulous!
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Wow! How cool is that? Did you walk around the Gaslamp to figure out most of the photographs, or did you have a good idea to begin with?
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Because I worked downtown (this was in 1986), I wondered around on my lunch hours until I identified all the pictures (they asked for the address of each one). Many were small, decorative parts of the buildings so they weren’t easy to find.
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Congrats on your victory!
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