The line of cars parked along Point Loma Avenue this year ran longer than it ever has. On September 12, the Sunset Cliffs Auto Show pulled 115 vehicles into its fourth annual show, from a 1900s-era brass automobile to a car with a Hollywood credit to its name, judged across 12 categories with a cash prize and a two-night stay at The Inn at Sunset Cliffs on the line for Best in Show. A few blocks away, past a stretch of coastline the show takes its name from, the city has spent the better part of two years bolting barricades into place because the cliffs themselves are coming apart.
Both of those things are true about Point Loma right now, and neither one is new information if you already live here. What's worth sitting with is how directly they're connected. The show didn't just grow this year. It grew around a missing landmark, on a stretch of road the city is actively redesigning because the ground underneath it can't be trusted the way it used to be.
A Fourth Year, and the Biggest One Yet
The show is the kind of event that only works because a neighborhood keeps showing up for it. Gavin Fleming, who owns and manages The Inn at Sunset Cliffs, has said he sat on the idea for roughly ten years before finally deciding to try it. Four years in, it has become a genuine fundraiser, with proceeds going to the Ocean Beach MainStreet Association, the business improvement district behind much of the neighborhood's programming.
This year's roster was the largest yet, and the day was built to hold a crowd rather than just a car show. The Sandollar Band and The Juke$ Band handled live music. A Kids Zone ran Power Wheels races and a Hot Wheels Derby alongside a 3-Point Competition, and Gulls Hockey showed up for the family crowd. Raffle prizes topped $700 in value, and dog adoptions ran on-site all afternoon, a detail that matters more than it sounds like it should, since a week later Liberty Station hosts DogFest Southwest on September 19. Point Loma's fall calendar, it turns out, has a theme this year, and it runs through leashes as much as license plates.
The awards themselves lean into the coastline rather than away from it. Best in Show carries the Sunset Cliffs Award name. The most exotic entry wins the King Tide Award. Best Display takes home the Green Flash Award, named for the split-second optical phenomenon locals watch for at sunset. The show has built its own vocabulary out of the park it sits beside, which makes the timing of this year's edition harder to read as coincidence.
Why the Pancake Breakfast Had to Move
For most of the show's history, the opening pancake breakfast has had a natural partner: the Ocean Beach Pier. That pairing didn't happen this year. The Pier has been permanently closed due to structural damage from age and winter storm damage, and the breakfast, run by the Ocean Beach Community Foundation, relocated to Point Loma Avenue and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard instead, serving pancakes, sausage, fruit, and coffee for $20 a plate for adults and $12 for kids.
A displaced pancake breakfast is a small thing on its own. It's a bigger thing when you notice it's part of a pattern. The Pier didn't close because of a single storm. It closed because the same coastal forces reshaping the cliffs nearby have been working on the Pier's pilings for years, and this was the year the damage outran the repair budget. Point Loma residents didn't lose one landmark this year. They lost the anchor tenant of a tradition and had to build a workaround inside the same event that grew the most.
The Ground the Show Is Named For
Sunset Cliffs Natural Park runs 68 acres along a mile and a half of Point Loma's western edge, and the sandstone under it dates back as much as 75 million years, which sounds like it should be a source of stability rather than the opposite. It isn't. The City of San Diego installed permanent safety barricades between Adair and Osprey streets in December 2024, a direct response to worsening rock fractures and a real risk of collapse along that stretch. Those barricades are still there. They aren't a seasonal precaution. They're a standing acknowledgment that a section of a beloved public park is no longer safe to stand on the way it used to be.
The city's response goes further than fencing. Its Coastal Resilience Master Plan has floated reconfiguring Sunset Cliffs Boulevard itself into a one-way southbound road, a change aimed squarely at erosion and long-term sea-level rise rather than traffic flow. That's not a proposal about parking or congestion. It's a proposal about how much longer the road can keep functioning the way it currently does, on the terms the coastline is setting rather than the ones the city would prefer.
None of this shows up as a headline most residents are tracking day to day. It shows up as a barricade you walk around on your evening loop, a road diagram in a planning document you'd only read if you went looking for it, and a car show that had to build its opening breakfast a few blocks from where it used to sit. The cliffs are not an abstraction here. They're a variable the neighborhood's calendar now has to account for.
The Peninsula's Calendar Is Already Adjusting
Fall is also when the other half of Point Loma's coastline starts pulling its own crowd. The tide pools at Cabrillo National Monument, a short drive south of the show, are best visited in fall and winter, when low tides line up with daylight hours instead of the middle of the night, and the monument draws well over 350,000 visitors a year largely because of that window. It's a reminder that the same geology causing headaches at Sunset Cliffs is the reason people move here in the first place. The coastline doesn't ask permission before it changes the neighborhood's rhythm, whether that's a barricade going up or a tide pool opening for the season.
Stack the month up and a pattern appears that's easy to miss if you're only tracking one event at a time:
- September 12: Sunset Cliffs Auto Show, its biggest year, with a relocated pancake breakfast
- September 19: DogFest Southwest at Liberty Station, a second dog-forward event inside a single week
- Fall and winter: Cabrillo's tide pool season, timed entirely to the tide charts rather than the social calendar
None of these were planned around each other. They land the way they do because the peninsula's identity has always been more coastline than street grid, and a coastline doesn't keep a fixed schedule.
What the Locals Already Know
The instinct with a story like this is to treat the record turnout and the erosion as two separate items on a community bulletin board. They aren't. A neighborhood tradition just had its best year on record, built entirely around adapting to a landmark it lost. That's not a footnote to the story. That is the story. Point Loma isn't choosing between celebrating what it has and reckoning with what it's losing. This year, it did both on the same Saturday, on the same stretch of road.
If you already live here, none of this changes your Saturday morning walk or your reason for staying. It just means the walk itself is worth paying closer attention to this year, barricades and all.
Craig Lotzof & Associates has spent decades working the coastline from La Jolla down through Point Loma, and part of that work is simply paying attention to a neighborhood the way its residents do. If you're weighing a move within the peninsula, curious what a property near the barricaded stretch is actually worth given the city's long-term plans for that road, or just want a candid, no-pressure conversation about where things stand, schedule a private market consultation whenever the timing works for you.
