The Watts-Robinson Building rose in 1913 on Fifth and F, part of the concentrated building surge that transformed downtown San Diego in the two years before the Panama-California Exposition and the opening of the Panama Canal. Built as a jewelers' building, it housed individual offices for jewelers, gemologists, and watchmakers in a specialized commercial type that concentrated the high-value, low-bulk jewelry trade in a single secure location with shared vaults, insurance, and clientele. The building joined a distinct group of downtown structures from that year, including the Gaslamp Plaza Suites at E Street, the Lincoln Hotel on Fifth Avenue, and the Jacob Weinberger United States Courthouse on F Street, all taller and more modern than the Victorian commercial blocks around them. Nathan Watts, who built the eleven-story Watts Building at E Street the same year as San Diego's first skyscraper, appears in the records of both jewelry buildings, though the exact relationship between the two structures and their developers remains unclear.
One of the earliest steel-framed buildings in the Gaslamp, the structure displays the tripartite arrangement of base, shaft, and cornice typical of Chicago Commercial style and early twentieth-century commercial architecture, with large windows appropriate to office use. The steel frame allowed for the height and window area that distinguished the 1913 building wave from earlier masonry construction.
