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Hawaii’s World
MY wife and I pop back to Carmel about every second year. Its square political boundaries embrace just about one square mile -- one of the most charming square miles of the 158,693 in California. California’s most
charming square mileArtists and writers established it in 1904 as a bucolic retreat in a pine-forested bay shore hillside. They allowed "progress" like paved streets, gas and electricity to come only gradually.
All of those are there now, but McDonalds, Sears, Safeway and others are not. The only national brand name stores my wife and I spotted early this month were The Nature Company and Sharper Image.
Smallness is the order of the day.
We never stumbled over any artists or writers on the streets, but it is no trick at all to find the Hog's Breath restaurant at the bottom of a dell entered via the low-rise, redwood Eastwood Building. It is owned by you-know-who, Carmel's former mayor, tough-guy actor Clint Eastwood.
Hog's Breath features a mammoth mural on a rock face of a Swiss alpine scene. Pleasantly effective. The food is better, locals say, since a new operator was brought in.
Eastwood was in the news while we were there as a jury weighed whether his Mission Ranch resort, also in Carmel, had in 1996 failed to provide a disabled woman with adequate access ramps.
The verdict came in just a few hours, based on a showing she hadn't actually tried to use the facilities in 1996. The jurors did find that access should be improved, as it since has been. Eastwood said the improvements were in the works at the time complained about.
Eastwood chose to fight the case in court rather than to settle as is common with such complaints. Almost $1 million was demanded. He had gone to Congress earlier to crusade against abuse of the disability law to extort settlements via nuisance suits.
"Make my day" was one of his famous tough-guy screen lines. He made his own day with the federal court victory, which got a lot of media attention.
My recollection, possibly wrong, is that it was not until after the Eastwood mayoralty that the city council finally relaxed an ordinance against eating ice cream cones on the street.
The council spends a lot of time on matters of such gravity. We attended a meeting where it was decided that a homeowner would have to rebuild his patio rather than chop back a tree growing through it and getting bigger all the time.
The result is a low-rise city of 4,200 where almost every street is shaded by pines grown to heights of tens of feet. Homes built to the limits of 6,000-square-foot lots often abut each other.
ARTISTS with easels can be seen along the beautiful bay but the city itself has dozens upon dozens of small art shops for every one of them. Wares range from Asian and European classic to romanticized American scenes that seem to be the best sellers.
Visitors stay in a scattering of low-rise hotels plus many bed and breakfast inns. Weekend sellouts are common. San Francisco is not much more than 100 miles to the north. San Jose and Silicon Valley are even closer.
The purity of Carmel's environmental regulations is modified when one drives out of town and across California Route 1 to Carmel Valley.
At its entrance is an upscale, though low-rise, shopping center where even Safeway and Burger King are allowed. We like an adjacent subsection of it called The Barnyard. It has colorful flowering plants and mini-gardens replenished year-round.
We wish Hawaii could have one but our land prices might put off a developer from such low-intensity offerings of commercial space.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.