John Steinbeck on 17-Mile Drive, 1960.
Pebble Beach promotional brochure.
John Steinbeck is associated almost as closely with the towns on the Monterey Peninsula as he is with his hometown of Salinas. A gentle rivalry between Salinas and the peninsula erupts at times. Is he a valley man or a coast man? After all, a street in New Monterey was renamed Cannery Row in 1957 because Steinbeck wrote a book about it. His best friend, Edward Flanders Ricketts, had a lab on Cannery Row, a weathered, beloved building that still stands. In Pacific Grove his family had a summer home, a tiny board-andbatten cottage where he and Carol lived during the 1930s. And, in Carmel, Steinbeck’s politics were forged. Each of these peninsula communities shaped this writer’s psyche during the 1930s, the decade when he wrote some of his best fiction.
More broadly, the peninsula itself had left an imprint on Steinbeck’s sensibilities since childhood. The Monterey Peninsula exudes a more freewheeling air than inland Salinas, a town that is surely a part of the more conventional West, with its rodeo and hillside cattle ranches, its growers and crop rotation. Even the meteorological climate differs radically between the two places, though they are less than twenty miles apart. Whereas Salinas Valley farms depend on migrant labor, the peninsula draws fishermen, artists and artisans, immigrants, and tourists. During Steinbeck’s formative years, there were few radical changes in the Salinas status quo. The same was not true on the Monterey Peninsula. The peninsula is a dynamic place, perhaps best defined by the ecological notions of diversity, adaptation, and evolution.
To appreciate fully John Steinbeck’s California fiction, one must recognize that the two ecosystems he knew best growing up, the fertile Salinas Valley and the splendid Monterey Peninsula, generated very different stories based on different histories. Anglo-Saxon, westering pioneers are the major players in Steinbeck’s valley fiction—Joseph Wayne in To a God Unknown, Jody’s grandfather in The Red Pony, the Joads, Adam Trask, and Sam Hamilton in East of Eden. They are empire builders—dreamers on the move. Historically, as in Steinbeck’s fiction, most mid-nineteenth-century farmers and ranchers came from the East to till soil and graze cattle in the inland valleys of California. Settlement on the Monterey Peninsula, on the other hand, was multidirectional and multiethnic, more accessible to ownership on small tracts. “Mongrel” Monterey, an 1887 article in Harper’s magazine quipped. It’s a fitting term. The peninsula’s layered settlement history drew a diverse and yeasty mix of peoples: Spanish padres and soldiers; Mexican settlers; Chinese and Japanese fishermen; Portuguese whalers in the 1850s; Italian and Sicilian fishermen; powerful Anglo railroad owners, fueling a development boom in the 1880s; and Scandinavian and Italian cannery owners in the early 1900s. Its human population, even today, is as diverse as the marine life in the two-mile deep canyon that bisects Monterey Bay, a canyon twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.
Steinbeck captures the peninsula’s mix. What fascinated him was hardly noted in the clamor for the development of Pebble Beach properties, for ever-larger fishing boats and greater sardine catches, or for additional reduction plants to process sardines into highly profitable fish meal and fish oil. In a place where, by 1900, most land had been claimed by the church, the military, and the Pacific Improvement Company, ordinary folk inhabited the margins. Three of Steinbeck’s most endearing books, his Monterey trilogy, are about adapting to life on the edge: Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday.
Approaching the Monterey Peninsula from the north on Highway 1, as many visitors do, is to first glimpse the bay as “a blue platter,” to feel the same thrill that overcomes Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby when he sees New York City from the Queensboro Bridge: “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” From Highway 1, Monterey Bay, whether sparkling blue in sunshine or gray with fog, beckons with similar allure. “Some time or other,” declared a 1928 pamphlet on the “Circle of Enchantment,” “someone, a pioneer ancestor of yours perhaps, looked upward and dreamed of this Peninsula.” One late-nineteenth-century brochure is named, succinctly and aptly, “Fulfillment.”
View from railroad yard to wharf, circa 1908.
In his fiction, Steinbeck mentions the little towns and attractions along this route: the amusement park in Santa Cruz; Watsonville, where his sister Esther lived; the inland Pajaro Valley (site of In Dubious Battle), where apples grew “crisp and full juiced”; Moss Landing, where the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) constructed the largest steam-generated plant in the west—and where a whaling station once stood. “Johnny Bear,” one of Steinbeck’s best stories, is set in the gritty little town of 
Castroville, now Artichoke Capitol of the World.
One evening Steinbeck and a Stanford friend, Toby Street, “were coming back from Palo Alto on the way to Salinas and we stopped for a beer at a bar just outside Castroville,” reported Street in an interview. “We were sitting there talking, and suddenly we heard the bartender speaking to somebody wearing bib overalls”—a large, clumsy man, a mute, telling stories with his fingers. Steinbeck drew from that experience in writing “Johnny Bear.”
Past Castroville, Highway 1 cuts through sand dunes, once training grounds for the U.S. army and before that for Presidio infantry, cavalry, and field artillery units. (It’s now known as Ford Ord Dunes State Park.) Soldiers from the 11th Calvary Unit, stationed at the Presidio in the 1930s, make cameo appearances in Cannery Row. In 1939, the lovely bay seemed vulnerable to enemy attack, and the U.S. government carved out additional acres of land for 
Fort Ord, a major army installation from 1940 to 1994. Fort Ord is now home to California State University, Monterey Bay. A bicycle/walking trail that starts in Castroville loops through the dunes and Seaside, and hugs the bay into New Monterey, Cannery Row, and Pacific Grove.
Now booming with new homes and dotted with fine little Mexican cafés and Japanese sushi restaurants, 
Seaside was, in Steinbeck’s time, the underside of the bay, home to a post office, a dump, and a Southern Pacific Railroad depot. When Monterey houses of prostitution closed during World War II, a few moved to Seaside. Seaside was also where, in Cannery Row, excellent bargains could be struck. Mack and the boys were “some time acquiring a stove” in Seaside for the Palace flophouse. After World War II and President Truman’s order to integrate the armed services, Seaside and Fort Ord attracted a number of African American military personnel; by 1980, this area had the most concentrated black population between Los Angeles and Oakland.
Marilyn Monroe as Castroville’s 1948 artichoke queen.
In July 1946, the Monterey Peninsula Herald asked John Steinbeck to write a piece on Monterey. The annual Feast of Lanterns, held in Pacific Grove each July, is his metaphor for the peninsula’s freewheeling spirit.
The festival officially began in 1905 as a pageant reenacting an old Chinese legend about villagers searching in lighted boats for separated lovers. Some say that the festival grew out of citizens’ desire to replicate the lighted Chinese squid boats—squid drying having been banned on Point Alones in 1905. For the first Feast of Lanterns, the town rented several Chinese and Japanese fishing boats. Chinese lanterns and lights were—and still are—placed in windows and porches around town. Steinbeck wrote,
There was the great Feast of Lanterns—a hundred decorated boats, said the posters. Actually seven boats turned up and four of them forgot to light their lanterns. On the first turn three of the boats wandered away; on the second three more got lost, but the remaining boat went around and around for two hours completely oblivious to the hysterical cheers of the spectators. It is to be hoped that this spirit will continue—that no city planning, no show business sense overturns this magnificent attitude. The pledge that it will be kept should be made on the graves of the Elks who were late for the parade and the Eagles who never got there at all, and the fishermen who went around and around.
1913 drawing of Monterey Bay.
Centuries before Steinbeck, sailors and explorers first saw the bay from the west, from ships. The Chinese may have been the first lured to the peninsula, a legend Steinbeck knew: “I have been planting cypress trees to fill in some of the old ones that have died,” he wrote in 1948. “They seem to belong here. The Monterey cypress is unique in the world except for one part of China, and the myth is that the Chinese explorers long centuries before Columbus planted them here. It is known that the Chinese planted trees instead of flags as a token of discovery.” Later, the Spanish planted flags as symbols of possession. In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who was seeking “cities rich with gold,” claimed the land for Spain. Sixty years later, Sebastián Vizcaíno wrote that “we found ourselves to be in the best port that could be desired, for besides being sheltered from the winds, it has many pines for masts and yards, and live oaks and white oaks, and water in great quantity, all near the shore.” He named the peninsula in honor of his sponsor, the Condé de Monterey.
Visitors gather at Lovers Point in Pacific Grove to watch Feast of Lanterns festivities in 1910.
Nearly 150 years after Vizcaino’s expedition, Father Junipero Serra said mass on the same spot on June 3, 1770. Here Serra and commander Gaspar de Portolá dedicated themselves to building a Royal Presidio of Monterey and the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo. A year later, Serra moved his mission to Carmel, wanting both better land for crops and separation from a male enclave of soldiers. Both communities prospered. The Carmel Mission sheltered some 876 Indians at its peak in 1795. The presidio, housing soldiers and their families, servants and artisans, commanded the heights of Monterey and ensured the community’s stature as capital of Alta California. Today 
the Presidio Museum of Monterey is located on the lovely knoll where Vizcaíno, Portolá, and Serra once claimed the land for Spain. A cross marks the spot where Father Serra said his first mass.
A view of the Pacific coast today.
Carmel Mission, circa 1900.
Spanish or Mexican California, with Monterey as its capital, has been highly romanticized—by generations of California fourth-graders building popsicle-stick missions; by lovers of Ramona, book and pageant, who read the novel as a eulogy for the elegant Spanish rancho; and by real estate developers, “minds inflamed by moving pictures,” as Steinbeck wrote about the Mission architectural style of Santa Barbara, imitating “mud houses, architecturally reminiscent of the poorer parts of Spain in the fifteenth century.” For Steinbeck, Spanish California was a rough-hewn sixty-year period to which he alludes occasionally, ironically, and critically—even empathetically—but never romantically.
Lives were trampled in the land-grabbing fervor, Steinbeck suggests:
Hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. These tough, dried-up men moved restlessly up the coast and down. Some of them stayed on grants as large as principalities, given to them by Spanish kings who had not the faintest idea of the gift. These first owners lived in poor feudal settlements, and their cattle ranged freely.
Steinbeck’s texts are punctuated with references to a shadowed history of Spanish and Mexican acquisition, exploitation, and assimilation. (Most of the large land grants—up to sixty miles long—were made during the twenty-five years that Mexico held California, 1821-46.)
Tortilla Flat may be Steinbeck’s ode to what was best in Spanish Monterey—its ephemeral beauty and stately pace and the Californios’ camaraderie. That book captures the sleepy appeal of Spanish Monterey—bypassed as the capital of California in 1848 and again by the gold rush in 1849—the peninsula town that seemed caught in a time warp for the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps until World War II. “Clocks and watches were not used by the paisanos of Tortilla Flat,” Steinbeck writes. “For practical purposes, there was the great golden watch of the sun.” And the paisanos of Tortilla Flat, “a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and assorted Caucasian bloods,” carefully negotiate conflicting cultural claims that were the legacy of Spanish and Mexican rule. The paisanos balance their own mongrel bloodlines, reverence for the Catholic Church, an acquisitive dominant culture (represented by an Italian merchant, Torelli), and women’s claims on domesticity and historicity (“Dolores Engracia Ramirez was a member of the ’Native Daughters of the Golden West’”). Balancing and subsequent blending of traditions and bloodlines is a significant part of the Monterey Peninsula’s history.
Robert Louis Stevenson, a peninsula visitor in 1879-80, anticipated Steinbeck’s fictional terrain—stories about “quaint” survivors, jetsam of lavish development. “The Monterey of last year exists no longer,” Stevenson wrote in 1880. “A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway…. Alas for the little town. It is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaires of the Big Bonanza.”
1925 brochure for the Hotel Del Monte.
A bonanza it most certainly was, something akin to the overnight transformation of the Sierra Nevada foothills into gold mining camps. In 1852, a wily Scottish clerk named David Jacks bought the former Pueblo of Monterey (just under 30,000 acres) at auction for $1,002.50 and over the years snagged most of the land on the peninsula, eventually owning 90,000 acres in Monterey County. On January 1, 1880, the Southern Pacific Railroad came steaming onto the peninsula from San Francisco. Three of the railroad’s “Big Four,” who earlier drove the Golden Spike on their way to fabulous wealth, bought land for a hotel and, later, acres of Jacks’s empire. The four men—Collis P. Huntington (railroad magnate, lobbyist in Washington, D.C.), Leland Stanford (governor of California, U.S. senator, founder of Stanford University), Charles Crocker (merchant and railroad builder), and Mark Hopkins (Crocker’s partner)—created the Pacific Improvement Company and set about to “improve” the peninsula. Competitive Crocker conceived of a resort to rival those on the French Riviera and had his vision constructed in 100 days. Beginning in June 1880, trains brought well-heeled tourists from San Francisco to what quickly became the premier resort on the Pacific Coast, 
the Hotel Del Monte.
In the 1890s, Lucy Morse, a student at Stanford University, came to the peninsula to study its history and interview old residents. She wrote a narrative that includes this description of “native Californians of Monterey” as
peculiar people. Good natured, happy, courteous, genial; knowing and apparently caring little for the outside world, and totally oblivious of the wealth of their historic surroundings. However there is something of delight as well as a touch of pity, in meeting people who do not put commercial value upon a sight of their ancestral homes nor try to live off the tourist. Though Spanish by descent, many of them knowing no other language, few of them without a trace of Indian blood, they are patriotic American citizens. Pictures of Dewey and Sampson are hung on many an adobe wall.
Steinbeck writes in a similar vein about “good people of laughter and kindness” who are “clean of commercialism, free of the complicated system of American business, and having nothing that can be stolen, exploited or mortgaged that system has not attacked them very vigorously.”
Steinbeck knew about the paisanos of Monterey. Their exploits were the stuff of news stories. Pilon of Tortilla Flat was in life Eduardo Romero (called Pilon by friends), “a chronic thorn in the side of Monterey police … [who] inspired many of Steinbeck’s yarns,” reported the Monterey Peninsula Herald in 1957, the year Pilon died. He was “truly an institution in this community,” added Municipal Judge Ray Baugh, the man who was called to sentence him from time to time. Pilon and Eduardo Martin lived in Iris Canyon in Monterey, rows of wine bottles lined up outside their camp: “Absolutely, Pilon and me, we was just like brothers,” Martin said in 1957 at his proclaimed age of ninety-seven. “We were always together. When you see one, you wait a few seconds, and then you see the other one.” When Pilon got drunk with Eduardo one day in 1953, he stabbed his friend and was charged for the crime. Steinbeck wired a telegram to Judge Baugh: “I protest Pilon’s arrest. Are the times so degenerate? Since when is it a crime to knife your friend? Pilon’s motive was certainly pure, probably philanthropic and possibly noble. Judge Baugh, who is paisano himself, will surely gild justice with understanding.” And Baugh did.
The Hotel Del Monte in 1880.
Sal Colleto, a Monterey fisherman, said in his memoir that Pilon helped his father cut down the pine trees in back of the American Legion Hall:
There was always available Pilon, and some of his Mexican and California Indian friends. They were always around because that’s where the center of activity was, and they liked my Dad’s wine, which was used customarily with the meals. The California Indians did not want money for their services. They wanted food and wine.
Steinbeck’s intention was not to stereotype. When Tortilla Flat was being turned into a play by Jack Kirkland in 1937, Steinbeck wanted an all-Mexican cast for the play, as he told a local reporter. When he saw the script, he didn’t like it:
There are so many little undertones that he has got wrong. I don’t want to maintain my book but I would like to maintain the people as I know them. Let me give you an example. Jack makes them want wine and need wine and suffer for wine whereas they want the thing wine does. They are not drunkards at all. They like the love and fights that come with wine rather than the wine itself.
Eduardo “Pilon” Romero, Eduardo Martin, and Tomas Romero.
From 1880 until its closing in 1943, the “Queen of American Watering Places” promised peninsula living at its best—and came to be the face that Monterey showed the world. In its first six weeks of operation, the hotel turned down three thousand requests for accommodation. Located near what advertisements bragged was the “Riviera of America,” the Del Monte was a place “where every day is a perfect day.” A 126-acre garden, “the most varied in the world,” was graced with plants from six continents and featured a multi-acre maze and an “Arizona garden” filled with cacti brought from the desert. The hotel housed four hundred guests in Victorian splendor. Each room had a telephone, an uncommon luxury in 1880; hot and cold running water, also innovative; and lovely fireplaces, many with ornamental tiling—”those in the office representing scenes portrayed by Scott in his Waverly novels,” reported one journalist. In addition to the hotel grounds, the operation at Del Monte included seven thousand acres of forest; in 1883, the Pacific Improvement Company purchased another eleven thousand acres in Carmel Valley, from which it created a water system.
Spreckels family at the Hotel Del Monte, 1905.
Choices of diversion for guests were many. On the bay, the hotel built the first glass-enclosed swimming pool in the nation, pumping seawater into large swimming tanks that were surrounded by a “wilderness of tropical plants.” Eventually the hotel had five polo fields, a one-mile racetrack, tennis courts, a game preserve, and a guest ranch at the headwaters of the Carmel River, an hour’s drive from the hotel by auto. In 1881, a scenic drive for guests was opened, renowned 17-Mile Drive. And, in the 1890s, the hotel opened a golf course, which came to be known as the “oldest course west of the Mississippi,” other smaller, earlier courses having closed. The famed Pebble Beach golf course (originally Del Monte’s second course at Pebble Beach), carved out of Pacific Improvement Company lands, opened officially for play on February 22, 1919. An art gallery devoted exclusively to California art opened in 1907. Hotel Del Monte offered luxury piled on top of luxury.
For thirty-five years, the Hotel Del Monte was a monument to style, lavish accommodation, and incomparable beauty. When the hotel’s fortunes drooped prior to World War I, Samuel F. B. Morse—brought in to liquidate holdings of the Pacific Improvement Company in 1915—ended up revitalizing the hotel and, in fact, preserving the region’s appeal through expanded golf facilities, open spaces, and controlled housing development. Reorganizing the old Pacific Improvement Company as Del Monte Properties Company, he sold lots in Pebble Beach and Del Monte Forest. Sport, health, and beauty made an irresistible package. Peninsula developers marketed the perfectibility of life. In 1943, the hotel was leased to the U.S. Navy, which eventually purchased the hotel and 603 acres of surrounding land. In 1951, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School moved in, where it still resides today.
Steinbeck claimed that many of his settings were composites. That is true of Tortilla Flat. In California, the term “tortilla flats” described Mexican enclaves. Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat might have been near Johnson Avenue in Monterey (up Madison to Monroe) by the American Legion Hall—the region photographed by Nelson Valjean, an early biographer who knew Steinbeck. A ravine runs behind, like the gulch described in the novel. Monterey high school Spanish teacher Sue Gregory lived in this area, at 889 Johnson Avenue. Her grandfather was William Hartnell, the patrón, and old paisanos came to her with problems as they had come to her grandfather. She advised the Spanish club at her house and told Steinbeck stories about paisano life. In a December 1936 article in the Monterey Peninsula Herald, Police Chief Monte Hallum said, “These were pretty good people. They were friendly and helped within their means…. Some of Tortilla Flat is fiction but a lot is true.”
Some say Tortilla Flat was in New Monterey, up from the bay on Huckleberry Hill. A man named Pirate with scores of dogs lived there. Others claim it was west of Monterey Peninsula College (Jack Rabbit Hill), on the corner of Fremont and Abrego. Pilon and his friend Eduardo Martin lived there and often slept in an old bathtub.
We had a whole lot of fun. We pretty well drinking wine. In Iris Canyon, across the highway from the cemetery. We lived in a box in Iris Canyon behind the willows. A big box. Like a coffin. Make out of tin. We used to get in there to drink wine. Especially when raining.
In 1940, Fortune magazine located “John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat” off Highway 1 on a hillside near the Carpenter Street exit. That Carmel location is roughly verified by Emil White in Circle of Enchantment: a broad field “bounded by First and Third Avenue, Carpenter Street and the boundary of the Hatton Ranch had been named Tortilla Flat by the mail stage drivers. The Gomez house, at Santa Rita and First, which stood until September 1941, is reported to have provided the setting for Steinbeck in Tortilla Flat.” And Bruce Ariss, friend of John Steinbeck, concurs in his book Inside Cannery Row.
It is likely that they are all right. Steinbeck loved composite locales—and he loved to keep people guessing.
In 1936, the Del Monte Hotel published Famous Recipes by Famous People, and John Steinbeck contributed a recipe, “Tortilla Flat.” “Soak beef four hours in vinegar and drain. Cook in one can of tomato sauce and mushrooms in a good-sized casserole. Remove from fire and add a cup of rich cream.”
House on Tortilla Flat, circa 1939.
On December 9, 1933, “Repeal Night” was held in the Bali Room, a room painted with Balinese dancers. Samuel Morse was no teetotaler. “Baccus, the god of wine, will preside at Court in all his pomp and glory … after a drought of 15 years.” The $2.50 cost included dinner and a dance. The Carmel Art Association’s Bal Masques were held in 1934, 1935, and 1936, the first invitation graced with a flying pig, later Steinbeck’s personal symbol (“To the stars on the wings of a pig” he inscribed under a stamp he had made). On July 7, 1939, a Tortilla Flat theme dance was held at the Del Monte.
But all other parties were eclipsed by Salvador Dali’s “party of the century” on September 2, 1941—a party, Samuel Morse told Dali when the idea was hatched, “such as has never been given on the Monterey Peninsula.” “Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest” was a benefit, proceeds going to European refugee artists. On paper, all seemed promising: the cost was $4.00 with dinner, $2.50 without. “It is requested that you come in costume, preferably in a costume copied after your dream, or in a costume of a primitive animal or of the people of the forest,” reads the invitation.
To create the effect of a grotto (and “depress the guests,” reported the newspaper the next morning), four thousand gunnysacks filled with two tons of paper were suspended from the ceiling. Two thousand pine trees were brought in, twenty-four animal heads, twenty-four store window mannequins, and dozens of animals from the zoo in San Francisco—monkeys, a lion cub, and a giraffe. A wrecked car sat in one corner, and beside it, a nude model who had been drugged for the evening (to keep her immobile). Dali’s wife, Gala, “Princess of the Forest,” sported a unicorn’s head and reclined on a huge bed throughout dinner, cavorting with a tiger cub. A long table extending from the bed was decorated with squash, pumpkins, dried corn, melons, and fruit; along it strolled” an impassive porcupine.” The planners wanted diners to feel like they were feasting in bed with Gala. “We will startle everybody,” said the planners. That they probably did. Bob Hope attended, as did Robinson Jeffers, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Vanderbilts.
The headline in the Monterey Peninsula Herald the next day read, “Dali Baffles Best People.” Alas, since excessive funds were spend on decorations and preparations, little money was raised for refugees. As history would have it, that was the Del Monte’s last gala. The war forced it to close its doors.
Bob Hope and Jackie Coogan at Dali’s Surrealistic Night Party.
Drugged model near wrecked car.
Although the Hotel Del Monte is hardly mentioned in Steinbeck’s books, save through parody or in an ironic, irreverent aside, each reference reminds readers of the cultural gaps in Monterey: “Through the streets of the town, fat ladies, in whose eyes lay the weariness and the wisdom one sees so often in the eyes of pigs, were trundled in overpowered motorcars toward tea and gin fizzes at the Hotel Del Monte,” he writes in Tortilla Flat. The paisanos steal vegetables from Del Monte gardens to feed the hungry children of Teresina Cortez. In Cannery Row, the famous humorist Josh Billings dies in the Hotel Del Monte.
Steinbeck has fun with these cultural gaps. Mack and the boys model their first party for Doc on Del Monte glitz. In their pre-party imaginations “the place has got the hell decorated out of it. There’s crepe paper and there’s favors and a big cake … and it wouldn’t be no little mouse fart party neither.” Indeed, “In their minds the decorated laboratory looked like the conservatory at the Hotel Del Monte.” The wild masquerade in Sweet Thursday was probably modeled on Salvador Dali’s equally fantastic gala in 1941.
Fisherman’s Wharf, circa 1930.
Steinbeck’s peninsula fiction is about those who make do, those who could not pay the toll on 17-Mile Drive, those who could not afford a room at the Hotel Del Monte. To read his Monterey fiction in order—from 1935’s Tortilla Flat to 1945’s Cannery Row to 1954’s Sweet Thursday—is to trace a rough arc of the peninsula’s economic and social transformation as told in tall tales of barter and exploitation, of destruction and gritty survival. Each is a parable of adaptation, initiated by the upheaval of war. If Anglo development is about creating wealth, owning land, and controlling resources, Steinbeck’s ne’er-do-wells survive by another pattern—adaptation, niche survival, and tribal bonding.
The Monterey Peninsula’s famed beauty is on full display along 
17-Mile Drive, most easily accessed from Highway 1 via the Highway 68 exit.
In 1903, Teddy Roosevelt rode a horse along roughly the same terrain: “splendid gallops,” he wrote to his daughter. Most nineteenth-century guests at the Hotel Del Monte, however, left in a “tally ho,” a carriage seating six to eight people pulled by four to six horses. At one point, the hotel owned fifty of these carriages, each of which made the trip along one of the state’s first paved roads up to three times a day. Clearly 17-Mile Drive was one of the peninsula’s top attractions. Since 1901 it has been a toll road, costing twenty-five cents per person originally (free to hotel guests) and twenty-five cents for a two- to three-seat car in 1913.
The Crocker House on 17-Mile Drive.
The “grandest drive on the continent,” an 1892 flyer boasted. The original drive left the hotel and went first to Monterey adobes, to the Chinese fishing village (now Hopkins Marine Station), through Pacific Grove, along sand dunes near what is now Spanish Bay, and then along coastal land of disputed title—”Pescadero Beach, long and sandy; then Chinese Cove, small cozy and sheltered; then Pebble Beach,” originally covered with pebbles. At Carmel Bay, the road looped back.
Sentinel Point (then Midway Point, now the Lone Cypress) became the most celebrated spot on the drive. For Mary Austin, writing about the peninsula in 1914, the cypress trees “might have grown in Dante’s Purgatorio, or in the imagined forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake.”
Where the beach and tennis club is now located—Stillwater Cove—was once a Chinese fishing village where children sold abalone shells—the first souvenir stalls on the peninsula.
The Crocker Irwin House, perhaps the most elegant house on the peninsula, is just north of Pescadero Point. In 1952, the sale price was $350,000; in 1999 it sold for $13.2 million. Originally built for Mrs. Templeton Crocker, the house, called the “Crocker Marble Palace,” cost more than $2 million to build and decorate between 1926 and 1931. The cost was inflated by gold bathroom fixtures, black marble bathtubs, and travertine walls. The stone is reputedly from Mt. Vesuvius. In 1947, the Byzantine-style mansion was featured in My Favorite Brunette, starring Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour; it was also featured in the 1975 movie Escape from Witch Mountain.
Any tour of the peninsula should end in fine dining, perhaps at The Lodge at Pebble Beach or Roy’s at Spanish Bay. Elaine Scott stayed at The Lodge in 1949, when she was dating Steinbeck and she and Joan Crawford came to visit. Crawford covered for Steinbeck and Scott’s rather scandalous relationship—Elaine was a married woman.
Steinbeck, on the path to the Lone Cypress on 17-Mile Drive in 1960. He was filming an introduction to Barnaby Conrad’s film Flight, based on Steinbeck’s short story of the same name.
The Lone Cypress.
Hotel Del Monte burns in 1924.
“In 1936, Ed Ricketts’s lab burned, and he escaped with only clothes and typewriter.”
In Tortilla Flat, the region’s sustainable economies are contained in the paisanos’ ongoing efforts to finagle wine from the Italians or “in desperation,” working “a whole day cleaning squids for Chin Kee” to make two dollars. Land use is a leitmotif in all three peninsula books. The paisanos of Tortilla Flat inherit houses. One burns down, and who then owns that land? (Mexican land rights were, in fact, contested by whites well into the twentieth century.) In Cannery Row, the wily Mack cuts a fair real estate deal at the beginning of the book—“renting” the Palace Flophouse from Lee Chong and then creating a decent life by nibbling on the peninsula’s economic and ecological bounties. In the same novel, the Malloys stake out a vacant lot as their own, renting abandoned cannery pipes to the less fortunate and complaining as upward mobility bruises their contentment. In Sweet Thursday, the new owner of Lee Chong’s Market, a streetwise Los Angeles-raised Mexican, moves to the peninsula for money and then is duped out of Palace House ownership by the equally manipulative Mack. The books can be read as ironic commentaries on documented histories of peninsula land use.
Tortilla Flat concludes with Danny’s house burning: “Better that this symbol of holy friendship, this good house of parties and fights, of love and comfort, should die as Danny died, in one last glorious, hopeless assault on the gods.” Steinbeck’s fictional fire mimics scores of peninsula conflagrations, many with special significance. In 1906, the Alones Point Chinese settlement burned down. In 1909, the Mammoth Stables in Pacific Grove, reputed to be the largest in the west, burned to the ground—as did the Hotel Del Monte in 1887 and the new main building in 1924. The original Pebble Beach Lodge burned in 1917. The Del Monte Bathhouse went up in flames in 1930. Ed Ricketts’s lab was destroyed in 1936, one of many fires on Cannery Row. Fires suggest something about the peninsula’s dynamism: Change is endemic here.
In 1930, Steinbeck and his wife Carol, newly arrived on the peninsula, watched the Del Monte Bathhouse burn:
There was a great fire last night. The Del Monte bathhouse burned to the ground. We got up and went to it and stood in the light and heat and gloried in the destruction. When Cato was shouting in the Roman Senate “Carthago delenda est,” I wondered whether in his mind there was not a vision of the glorious fire it would make. Precious things make beautiful flames.
In 1906, four-year-old John Steinbeck probably did not witness the conflagration that destroyed the Chinese settlement on Point Alones. Nor would he have understood the consequences of this fire for the Chinese in the area, relocated to Monterey’s McAbee Beach. But he probably saw the ashes, only a few blocks from his family’s summer home. These fires are emblematic of something deep in Steinbeck’s psyche—awareness of devastation and the need for adaptation.
Many plant species depend on fire for their propagation. Fires favor the fringe dwellers, giving them a new foothold while in the same stroke making way for new develop-ment that will repeat the displacement cycle.
John Steinbeck located his peninsula novels within the flux of experience that fires represent.
A 1951 Turkish edition of Tortilla Flat.
