First Presbyterian Church of San Diego

Churches & Worship

About

First Presbyterian Church of San Diego in downtown San Diego's Bankers Hill dates to 1869 and occupies a Robert Hall Orr-designed Gothic Revival campus at 320 Date Street, making it one of the city's oldest continuously operating congregations. The campus houses City Tree Christian School, a K-8 program that shares the Date Street grounds with the congregation's worship, fellowship, and administrative facilities. A Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregation, First Presbyterian grew into one of the largest churches in the nation during the mid-twentieth century before suburban migration dispersed its membership across more than 50 zip codes — yet the campus remained downtown. The sanctuary features Gothic wood-beam architecture and a collection of stained-glass windows, including a notable east-transept panel depicting Christ and the rich young ruler, a subject rarely rendered in ecclesiastical glass. The church shares its Fourth Avenue chapel with Harbor City Church, a PCA congregation that holds separate worship services in the same building — a facility-sharing model that maximizes the historic campus's weekly utilization. The congregation's most complex ongoing project is maintaining the 1912-1913 Orr-designed campus itself, a preservation effort involving seismic assessment, stained-glass conservation, and compliance with California Historical Building Code standards for pre-1920 structures.

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