San Diego is the most mild mannered of American cities. But beneath the Clark Kent exterior, finds Adam Sachs, lies a stealth star

San Diego has a proud aeronautical history. Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis was built here. During the Second World War, production of B-24 Liberators helped fuel the prodigious military-industrial boom that enlarged and enriched the city. Inland from La Jolla's coves is the air base Miramar, former site of the Marines' Top Gun flight school, which gave the world fictional pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell and San Diego the nickname Fightertown, U.S.A.

Today, the city has a new flying attraction. She wears a skintight black catsuit and zips around on a harness suspended by steel cables. She is called the Wine Angel. She works at a restaurant called Osetra, in the city's refurbished and rebranded Gaslamp Quarter. Her job: to retrieve bottles from the "wine tower," a three-story frosted-glass refrigerator at the center of Osetra's hangarlike space. Part superhero, part sommelier, the Wine Angel is to enology what Shamu the killer whale is to marine biology.

The Gaslamp was once the Stingaree red-light district, home to Chinese opium dens, some 120 whorehouses, and the lawman Wyatt Earp. More than a century later, it is filled with jolly bars and restaurants like Osetra. The sixteen once-squalid square blocks of Victoriana at the city's center are freshly scrubbed—urban preservation by way of Chuck E. Cheese's. San Diego is a place of many self-styled "attractions": the San Diego Zoo, Shamu's SeaWorld. Now downtown is a cordoned-off attraction, too.

The Wine Angel is grounded the night I get to town. Or maybe she just left early. It is raining in San Diego, and the Gaslamp is mostly empty. At Osetra, I order a drink that a bartender is able to reach without the aid of cables. A couple seated at the bar tell the guy next to them how much they want to move to the neighborhood. The guy tells the couple that he lives upstairs, somewhere above the wine tower. They can't believe his luck.

Here I am at the trembling epicenter of the fun-quake that is the Gaslamp Quarter, and I can't help wanting to get away from it all. Fun is like cheese, I think—it shouldn't come wrapped up in neat little slices.

Where to go from here? My plan is to move away from the Gaslamp, from all the gated communities of fun, the DMZs of reputed good times, and head toward the coast to look for a more interesting, authentic San Diego. If only the rain will stop so I can go out and find it.

The setting sun is 93 million miles from Mission Beach, but for a minute or two it seems to hang before me, intimately close. For days all we've had is rain. Bad, crazy, biblical rain. The heavens wept, and the traffic all the way up to Orange County was a squishy, hydroplaning mess.

San Diego County has more than its share of climatic zones—from the coast to the mountains to the desert of the suburbanized interior. But in truth there are only two modes that really matter: rain and shine, dark and light, off and on. San Diego without sun is—to borrow Gay Talese's description of Frank Sinatra with a head cold, The Voice deprived of the voice—"Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel": an entire city, an entire county, rendered depressed, listless, purposeless without its raison d'être in the sky.