Miss [Gertrude] Stein announced she would not set foot in their town- nor would she meet any of its residents during her stay in the Monterey Bay region. Inhabitants of the village, she commented tersely, are high brows. She took rooms at a hotel inland from artistic Carmel with its cobblestones, poets and pines... I have no use for art colonies, said Miss Stein. I like ordinary people who don't bore me. - Los Angeles Times, 1935
Carmel-by-the-Sea, with its fairytale cottages, cypress covered sea vistas and hidden courtyards, is so beautiful that it almost seems sterile -- more a Disneyland resort than a real, breathing village. With a population of less than 4,000, the town caters to its weathly inhabitants and a plethora of enchanted tourists. Everywhere there are art galleries selling generic seascapes, high-count linen stores, and quaint, overpriced tea shops.
Recently, I spent the morning exploring Carmel, impressed by its beauty, but left cold by the endless jewelry shops selling estate diamonds and the luxury cars parked in front of thatched roof homes. Where was the soul of this famous art colony, the wild country where the likes of Jack London, Ansel Adams and Sinclair Lewis roamed the sea-sprayed cliffs like modern-day Heathcliffs?
Through a window, I spied a young man sitting at an easel, painting intently although it was scarcely 9 a.m. His name was Scott Jacobs, and surrounding him were vibrant, raw portraits of celebrities -- President Obama, and Bill Murray. We spoke for a few minutes, and I learned about his inspiring life story. He was a veteran, who had lived out his van for a time, and had been saved by his talent. As I left his gallery, I breathed a sigh of relief. New artists and new ideas were still occurring in Carmel-by-the-Sea; you just had to look past the veneer of glitz and commerce to see them.
Photo: Hadley Meares
From the beginning, the natural loveliness of this bay in Monterey County was evident to all who saw it. Around 1880, Dr. Davis Starr Jordan wrote in a report for the United Census Bureau:
Of all the indentions on the coast of California, the most picturesque and most charming is the little bay of Carmelo, which lies just south of Los Pinos, between this and the rocky cape of Los Lobos, its blue waters sheltered from the northwest trades by the pine-clad peninsula which ends in the reefs of the Point of Pines. No one lives on this bay at present except a farmer or two, a little colony of Chinese fishermen who have a pescadero or fishing camp in the edge of the pines, and a little group of Portuguese who watch for whales on a rocky ledge near Point Lobos.
Not surprisingly, it wasn't long before developers swept into Carmel. In 1900, San Franciscans Frank Devendorf and Frank Powers bought all the available land in the area, and formed the Carmel Development Company. Drawing on the secluded nature of the area (which could only be reached by stagecoach) and its extraordinary beauty, the men marketed their new development to the school teachers of California and other brain workers at indoor employment working at Northern California colleges. Along with professors, the company also wooed artists and bohemian types with Carmel's affordable land and picturesque vistas. Powers' wife, the influential painter Jane Gallatin, was one of the first people to establish a studio in Carmel. A brochure put out by the company explained their vision:
The settlement has been built on the theory that people of aesthetic ( as broadly defined) taste would settle in a town provided all public enterprises were addressed toward preventing man and his civilized ways from unnecessarily marring the natural beauty so lavishly displayed here.
However, it was an epic natural disaster that would make Devendorf and Powers' dream of a utopian art colony a reality. With the great earthquake of 1906, thousands of San Franciscans found themselves homeless, and their city in chaos. Artists from San Francisco began to flock to Carmel, and soon their friends joined them. The colony, with its unpaved roads, rough cottages and temporary tents, quickly attracted many influential artists of the day.
Two of the first artists to settle the area were the sisters Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan-Cooke, successful writers and literary highbrows. The poet and playwright George Sterling, author Jack London, photographer Arnold Genthe and writer Mary Austin, dubbed the most intelligent woman in America, would often crowd into singer Mable Gray Young's redwood cottage after a morning of solitary pursuits. We work in the morning, and everyone works hard at Carmel-by-the-Sea, Austin explained. In the afternoon we have mussel bakes, cut down boe trees, and sit on the front of the hills and look out over the sea- and we talk, always we talk.
From Left: George Sterling, Mary Austin, Jack London, and Jimmie Hooper at Carmel-by-the-Sea, early 1900s | Source: Public Domain
Austin, author of Western classics like 1903s The Land of Little Rain, wrote in a roofless treehouse built between three pine trees, and could often be seen ambling through the woods in the middle of the night, searching for inspiration. Her brooding counterpart Jack London could also be found exploring the woods, drinking martinis and shooting so many ducks that George Sterling finally captured a pair to ensure the local fowl population's survival.
The California press quickly began to report on this new, hard-to-reach hot bed of progressive ideas and artistic souls. In 1910, the same year Carmel's legendary Forest Theater was built, a visitor from the Los Angeles Times was clearly amused by this village where the butcher reads Browning, and the liveryman wears long hair :
In a shady pine shadow sat a masculine tuft of hair in front of an easel. He was doing the sunset. But the
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Miss [Gertrude] Stein announced she would not set foot in their town- nor would she meet any of its residents during her stay in the Monterey Bay region. Inhabitants of the village, she commented tersely, are high brows. She took rooms at a hotel inland from artistic Carmel with its cobblestones, poets and pines... I have no use for art colonies, said Miss Stein. I like ordinary people who don't bore me. - Los Angeles Times, 1935
