$10 million new gift: Laurie McGrath’s latest donation builds a waterfront tribute to those who served—elevating the family’s giving past $150 million

A decades-old promise to the city of San Diego moved dramatically closer to reality this week, and the reason has as much to do with one family’s history as it does with concrete and steel. At a news conference aboard the USS Midway, the McGrath Family Foundation announced a $10 million gift to the veterans park rising on Navy Pier—the single largest donation the project has received and enough to rename it McGrath Freedom Park at Burnham Navy Pier in the family’s honor.

The park itself carries an unusual origin story. More than twenty years ago, the California Coastal Commission required the Port of San Diego and the USS Midway Museum to build public parkland to offset the visual impact of docking the retired aircraft carrier along the Embarcadero.

Various stopgap fixes—a viewing deck here, a pedestrian walkway there—came and went without ever fulfilling that obligation, and by 2019 regulators found the port still in violation for continuing to use the pier as a parking lot.

Real momentum finally arrived in 2024, when the Port approved demolition of a long-vacant warehouse on Navy Pier, clearing the way for what will become, at 10 acres, the largest public park on the West Coast dedicated to veterans and military families.

When complete in 2028, it will stretch from the pier’s west end, around the Midway itself, to the Bob Hope Memorial, with a native-plants garden, a “Parade of Veterans” amphitheater, a 32-foot promenade, and interpretive exhibits on the pier’s naval history.

For Laurie McGrath, who leads the foundation her family built, the gift is not an abstract act of civic generosity—it is personal.

“I know my father is looking down with pride as we recognize his accomplishments and many contributions he made to the growth and vitality of San Diego’s economy,” she told the crowd gathered at the Midway. “It’s with heartfelt joy that I’m able to be part of this project, which honors his memory and brings the story full circle from his Navy roots to the enduring legacy he left here in San Diego.”

Her father, William “Bill” McGrath, enlisted in the Navy in 1941 and spent four years stationed in San Diego, serving in harbor operations for the Eleventh Naval District on the very waterfront where the park now rises (CW McGrath, Inc.; San Diego Union-Tribune).

One of eight children born to Tom and Dora McGrath in Oakland, Bill met Carlee and married her within six months, and the couple went on to build C.W. McGrath into one of Southern California’s largest general engineering and excavation firms, grading the subdivisions and paving the freeways that shaped San Diego County through the 1970s and ’80s. He died in September 2005 at 85, but the family’s imprint on the region—commercial and now philanthropic—has only grown since.

Jack McGrory, the former San Diego city manager who is co-chairing the park’s fundraising campaign alongside developer and Vietnam-era naval aviator Tom Sudberry, did not mince words about what the McGrath gift means for a campaign that has often advanced in fits and starts.

“We started out with a $77 million campaign to rehab the pier and build this beautiful veterans park, and we’ve got tremendous momentum,” McGrory said.

“Laurie’s gift is really transformational. We’ve struggled to get bits and pieces of this, but to get this large gift … we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

With the McGrath gift, total commitments have reached roughly $57 million—including nearly $12 million from the Port of San Diego—against the project’s $77 million price tag, leaving about $20 million still to be raised, Midway Museum spokesperson David Koontz said.

Port CEO Scott Chadwick added that the site’s significance may only deepen, noting the potential to build a larger Navy SEAL Museum directly across the street.

The Freedom Park gift is the latest in a long, deliberate pattern of giving from a foundation Laurie McGrath co-founded with her mother in 1986, initially built around Carlee’s passion for animal welfare.

Over four decades, it has widened into a broad philanthropic engine supporting children, women, and humanitarian causes locally and globally, from the Humane Society of the United States and PETA to Junior Achievement.

The foundation also built the McGrath Mountain Center in Park City, Utah, for adaptive skiers and outdoor athletes with disabilities and has steadily backed the National Ability Center, including a gift of nearly $1.7 million in shares donated in 2022.

Closer to home, the McGrath Family YMCA & Sports Complex in Rancho San Diego stands in part as a tribute to Bill McGrath’s legacy.

In recent years, the McGraths have turned that same instinct toward San Diego’s healthcare infrastructure at a scale few local family foundations attempt.

A $25 million gift established the McGrath Outpatient Pavilion at UC San Diego Health’s Hillcrest campus, a 250,000-square-foot facility that opened in 2025 housing oncology, neurosurgery, and advanced imaging programs.

And in 2023, a further $10 million pledge to Sharp HealthCare’s ENVISION campaign — mirroring, almost exactly, a $10 million gift the family made fifteen years earlier for Sharp’s Stephen Birch Tower — will name the future McGrath Tower at the Sharp Metropolitan Medical Campus, slated to open in 2030.

Taken together, the Freedom Park gift is less a departure than a continuation: a family whose fortune was poured into San Diego’s roads and subdivisions is now pouring an equally visible share of it back into the city’s hospitals, community centers, and—fittingly, given a father who once served on that very harbor—its waterfront tribute to the men and women who wore the uniform.