Christine Stokes, executive director for the Coronado Historical Association, recently became one of nine board representatives for Discover Coronado – the community’s official destination marketing organization.
So, she now gets to help promote Coronado as a vacation spot as well as the Historical Association and its museum, one of the community’s top tourist attractions along Orange Avenue.
Discover Coronado was created in 2010 to encourage the exploration of the many unique businesses, storefronts. and resorts on the island. And the board has always had a representative from the Coronado Historical Association.
Stokes borrowed a quote from Ken Kramer of “About San Diego” fame saying: “There’s more history in one square foot of Coronado than all the rest of San Diego.”
‘A place trapped in time’
That view is a sentiment taken to heart at the Historical Association and one that Stokes has been tasked with bringing to the spotlight on the Discover Coronado board.
Stokes, appointed by the City Council to her new board seat, calls Coronado “a place trapped in time,” and she encourages tourists and locals to explore what the island has to offer in the grand walkable streets that lead to and from resorts and across the soothing coastline.
For Stokes, preserving that environment is key in continuing to promote Coronado as a world renown tourist destination.
“Preserving history is about preserving the built environment,” she says.
Historical Association rich in city’s history
She notes that the Historical Association has more than 20,000 historical photos, and countless artifacts of importance to naval, urban, and cultural history on the island.
Stokes added that she gets a lot of help from local volunteers and benefactors who help preserve the historical charm of Coronado.
Stokes studied history at UC Santa Barbara, eventually receiving a master’s degree in Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program.
She said she fell in love with the discipline after taking her first public history course.
“Public history is the work historians do outside traditional academic history,” she said.
