California is an orphan of a state, and Monterey’s beginnings are the closest thing we have to a birth story. Admission Day—September 9, 1850, when California became an American state—doesn’t really amount to a birthday, since California was a province of two other countries, Spain and Mexico, long before that. Other birthday options are problematic, too. We can’t know the exact day, thousands of years ago, when native peoples arrived. And 16th- and early 17th-century Europeans (like Sebastián Vizcaíno, who gave Monterey its name) didn’t stick around long enough to establish much.

So the closest thing we have to a moment of birth is probably June 3, 1770. On that day, Junípero Serra, California’s controversial and cruel saint, held Mass and Spanish military Capt. Gaspar de Portolá planted the Spanish colors in Monterey, which would become California’s first capital—and most enduring place.

A quarter-millennium later, Monterey, for all its rough history, is often dismissed as too precious, and too much a place apart. But the same has been said about California. Indeed, the peninsula city—by serving both as a hideaway enclave and an open door to the world’s diverse peoples—has become an emblem of the state.

“Monterey was California’s experiment,” writes Dennis Copeland, the city of Monterey’s museums, cultural arts, and archives manager. “Monterey today represents California’s past, present, and future.”

Indeed, Monterey has a special ability to keep its past alive and connect its story to California’s future.

The famous—and famously brutal—mission system began in San Diego in 1769, but Monterey’s mission, at Carmel, would become the headquarters. In 1776, Spain declared Monterey the capital of its Alta California colony—inspiring the creation of other Spanish settlements in the late 18th century, including San Jose and Los Angeles.

Monterey survived a brief 1818 attack from—of all countries—the newly independent Argentina (its revolutionaries burned the presidio, stole what they could, and left). The Mexican government took over from Spain in 1822, and Monterey remained the provincial capital. Mexico also designated Monterey an official port of entry, making it a center of trade and commerce and California’s first “front door,” according to the late local historian J.D. Conway.

In that role, Monterey changed the world’s perception of California—from a feudal Spanish frontier backwater into a highly desirable destination. “The cosmopolitan atmosphere created by the international trade helped make Monterey a hotbed of liberal thought,” which produced elections and local self-government, wrote Conway in his terrific 2003 history, Monterey: Presidio Pueblo and Port. California’s tradition of political revolt got its start when Montereños rebelled against a series of provincial governors who were seen as favoring Mexico City’s needs over their own.

Monterey was where the Americanization of California began, with Commodore John Drake Sloat’s peaceful conquest of the city in 1846, and the establishment of the first American fort. In 1849, Monterey hosted the convention to produce the state constitution that California would use to muscle its way into the United States in 1850.

In the decades after statehood, a misguided conventional wisdom held that Monterey no longer mattered. Sure, the place suffered some indignities. Legal chicanery allowed a land baron to steal 30,000 acres. Santa Cruz, fueled by its American prejudice against the more Mexican Monterey, formed its own separate county. And in the 1870s, Salinas stole Monterey’s status as the Monterey County seat through a corrupt bargain that allowed the city of Hollister to make itself the seat of its own breakaway county, San Benito.

Despite these blows, Monterey—a global-facing, Spanish-Mexican-Catholic city—kept on prospering. Its sleepy reputation reflected the ignorance and bigotry of the rest of California, which was growing more Anglo, more nativist, more Protestant, and more violent towards native peoples than the missions had ever been. “California’s change from a Hispanic culture to an Anglo-Protestant culture made Monterey appear to be out of the mainstream,” Conway wrote.

Monterey quietly kept welcoming people: Chinese fishermen, Portuguese whalers from the Azores, even wealthy tourists who came to stay at Charles Crocker’s Hotel Del Monte. Artists arrived to form colonies, while marine scientists made camp to study the bay and the ocean. Waves of migrants from Sicily, Spain, the Balkans, Japan, and the Dust Bowl formed communities and businesses that local boy John Steinbeck would make famous in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.

In the 20th century, Monterey kept making itself the capital of new things. As the state grew interested again in its Spanish heritage, Monterey mined its own history and architecture to become the Adobe Capital of California. Monterey’s fishing and canning innovations also made it become the Sardine Capital of the World. And in the century’s second half, Monterey cemented its reputation a capital of tourism and cosmopolitan cool, with the establishment of the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958 and opening the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984.

Monterey’s embrace of military training and education facilities, especially for the study of foreign languages, has paid huge dividends. The Navy’s Postgraduate School found a home at the old Del Monte Hotel, and the military’s Defense Language Institute grew up at the Presidio of Monterey, spinning off the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Taken together, these institutes have allowed Monterey to host a cultural festival that celebrates it being a Language Capital of the World.

In all this, Conway, the local historian, saw a civic “schizophrenia”; Monterey, like California, clings to its past while relentlessly seeking out future new identities. That two-sidedness has made the city difficult to govern. Locals have fought for decades over water, growth, and downtown redevelopment.

But Monterey’s ability to remain so attractive and alluring—over these 250 years—also holds an important lesson for Californians: size and political power are not what make a city great. Instead, it is the places that truly welcome strangers, that collapse time and space, that connect us to history and the future, that remain worth celebrating.

I’m sad that COVID-19 forced the cancelation of the 250th birthday party Monterey spent two years planning for itself. But you can still honor the occasion the next time you visit the peninsula. First, savor the views from Lower Presidio Historic Park, where a native village once stood, where Vizcaíno landed in 1602, and where Serra and Portolà got things started in 1770.

Then wander over to San Carlos Cathedral, one of oldest buildings in this state, and say a prayer that California, and its real capital, will still be around to celebrate in another 250 years.

The post Why Monterey’s 250th Birthday Bodes Well for California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For this peculiar time, there may be no more desirable California place than that small strip of coastal Monterey County, within the city of Pacific Grove. Asilomar is more than just an unusual state park that includes a state beach, and a historic hotel and conference grounds. It’s also a versatile refuge where you can either isolate yourself or be with others.

And in a state as crazy and wired as ours, Asilomar is the rare place where Californians might actually find some peaceful sleep.

I’d been pining for the pines of Asilomar long before the coronavirus shut down our daily lives. A few months ago, I made reservations for my family to spend a long weekend of the kids’ early April spring break there with my mother-in-law and father-in-law, who have never been. My wife suggested the trip because Asilomar is that rare location where I, an annoyingly energetic person who works all the time, can actually shut down and relax.

Two weeks ago, however, Gavin Newsom blew up our plans. The governor invoked his power over the state park to close the conference grounds and hotel so they could be used to quarantine passengers exposed to COVID-19 on the Grand Princess cruise ship. As many as two dozen passengers may already be there. And there are strong hints that Asilomar could become a major center for quarantines as the pandemic worsens.

This prospect has sparked considerable Monterey-area media coverage, with county officials and citizens raising questions about what’s happening at Asilomar. Adding to the concern have been unexplained patrols of the property by U.S. marshals, and temporary layoffs of hotel employees.

Such worries, while understandable, miss the point of the place. That Asilomar would play a comforting role in this crisis is completely in keeping with its history; just as California has been a refuge for people around the world, Asilomar has long been a refuge for Californians. In that sense, it’s long been one of California’s Californias.

Merrill Hall at Asilomar. Courtesy of Wayne Hsieh/flickr.

Asilomar’s origins lie in the story of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and its efforts to shelter young women as they relocated from farms to cities in search of jobs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the YWCA offered not just housing but training and education in subjects from finance to typing. That created a need for spaces in different parts of the country where YWCA leaders and the women they served could gather, rest, and strategize.

Asilomar was the result of the efforts of some of the leading women of early 20th century California—among them Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Ellen Browning Scripps, both from famous publishing families—to create a West Coast conference grounds for the YWCA. The Pacific Improvement Company donated the land and the architect Julia Morgan, later famous for Hearst Castle, was hired to design it. In 1913, the grounds opened for a YWCA student leadership conference. For a contest, a Stanford student, Helen Salisbury, invented the name Asilomar by combining the Spanish words for refuge (asilo) and sea (mar).

In subsequent years, more land and more Morgan-designed buildings were added to Asilomar, allowing the property to accommodate more than 500 people. By the 1920s, Asilomar was being used year-round, by camps, colleges, churches, conferences, and gatherings of all sorts of Californians seeking refuge.

In those days, the summer still belonged to the YWCA, with its leadership conferences and summer camps. Meanwhile, a distinct and enduring vibe of “quietness” had formed. A 1931 newsletter produced by camp workers described the “differentness” of life where the sounds included “the moan of the wind and the drip of water from the fog-clad pines” and the sights consisted of “the whiteness of the sand dunes, the blueness of the ocean, and the rare beauty of the sunsets.”

The document observed how refuge at once removes us and connects us:

Jobs and folks and life in general are new to each other, and for these reasons a certain amount of adjustment is necessary. Selfish desires must be given up for the sake of the group. But as the summer moves on week after week, this adjustment is soon made and the individuals are moving as one united body, ready to work or to play as occasion demands.

Asilomar nearly didn’t survive the Great Depression and Second World War. In 1934, the YWCA, unable to keep funding its conference facilities, voted to close Asilomar and sell it. But no one would buy it. And so Asilomar was leased for a few years to motel owners. As the country moved into war, it became a National Youth Administration training camp and then a temporary living quarters for the military families of Fort Ord and the Defense Language Institute.

Post-war, the YWCA reopened the grounds as a money-making conference facility, even as it was trying to sell the place. By the 1950s, Pacific Grove residents and other local communities, who were afraid the property would be sold to a glass company interested in sand extraction, formed a Save Asilomar Committee. That touched off a series of conversations and state legislation that led to Asilomar becoming a state park in 1956.

The place has grown and changed in the years since. In the 1960s and ’70s, new structures were added, as part of a master plan created by San Francisco architect John Carl Warnecke, perhaps best known for his “eternal flame” memorial to John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery. The state acquired nearby land for environmental reasons, extending the park beyond 100 acres, and has worked diligently in recent decades to preserve and restore Asilomar’s dunes.

Over time, Asilomar has developed a reputation as a good location for serious thinking—especially for Californians getting together to talk over the future of science and technology. Most famously and controversially, in 1975, a meeting there produced a historic agreement in which scientists ended a moratorium on recombinant DNA research and designed new “Asilomar Conference” guidelines for genetic manipulation that effectively constitute a voluntary honor system. More recent Asilomar conferences have examined the risks of everything from artificial intelligence to climate change interventions.

The ethos of this collection of small buildings and small dunes remains simple and rustic, which is part of what makes the place so versatile and valuable. It also feels gloriously disconnected. The rooms don’t have phones or televisions. The beds are simple and comfortable. The rates are reasonable.

You don’t do much at Asilomar—you can walk the trails or the beach, do some bird-watching, rent a bike, play volleyball, or play pool at the tables at the main lodge. Those guests now in quarantine can’t leave their rooms, but, for that, I somewhat envy them. Asilomar is a terrific place to catch up on sleeping and reading.

On my last Asilomar visit, I re-read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and underlined this passage: “Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.” 

The post Quarantine Me at Asilomar! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Further north, welcome as well to Modesto, Sacramento, Placerville, and Yuba City. And, to the south, you’re invited, too, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and Salinas. And while you’re almost in another state, don’t worry, Tahoe City, because the Bay waters are warm.

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future. If you’re in a smaller Northern California region struggling to compete with the advanced grandeur of the Bay Area, why not join forces with the Bay Area instead?

The Bay Area would benefit, too. It is one of four connected Northern California regions—along with the greater Sacramento area heading up into the mountains, the northern San Joaquin Valley, and the north Central Coast triumvirate of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties—that face severe challenges in housing, land use, jobs, transportation, education, and the environment. Since such problems cross regional boundaries, shouldn’t the regions address them together as one giant region?

The Northern California Megaregion—a concept developed by a think tank, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute—includes 12 million people, 21 counties, and 164 incorporated cities. It extends from the Wine Country to the Lettuce Lands of the Salinas Valley, and from the Pacific to the Nevada border.

These places, while different, are already linked, by infrastructure and flows of capital and commodities that date back to the Gold Rush. Today, the Megaregion has grown more integrated as people search a wider geography for jobs and schools, while businesses expand by serving more of Northern California.

The trouble is that this growth is imbalanced. The Megaregion is home to the mega-rich San Francisco and Marin and three of California’s poorest cities: Stockton, Vallejo, and Salinas.

The 21-county, 12 million person Northern California Megaregion, a concept developed by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Courtesy of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The imbalance of high-paying jobs created in the Bay Area, coupled with scant and expensive housing, results in a sky-high cost of living that blunts the benefits of high salaries. It also has produced an out-migration of younger people and companies. Some of these Bay Area refugees head to East Bay exurbs, the Sacramento area, and even to the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where housing prices are one-third of those in the Bay Area proper and still haven’t recovered to their pre-recession highs. But once there, they often find themselves too far away from their jobs and preferred educational institutions. The result is brutal traffic that slows the movement of goods, produces more greenhouse gases, and creates long, unhealthy commutes for workers.

Figuring out how to rebalance the Megaregion and solve such problems is a high-stakes challenge, and not just for Northern Californians. The entire state relies heavily—perhaps too heavily—on the growth and tax revenues generated by the Bay Area, which accounts for one-third of the California economy.

Nationally, too, the future of megaregions matters. Defined as sets of neighboring metropolitan centers that share infrastructure, environmental concerns, and economic connections, Megaregions are projected to be home to 70 percent of the national population growth between now and 2050. During that period, just 11 American megaregions will be home to 80 percent of the country’s job growth.

For all these reasons, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute’s 2016 report, “The Northern California Megaregion,” deserves more consideration because it offers a vision for how the Golden State might spread out prosperity beyond its richest centers, creating a more distributed version of the California dream.

This is not about letting the Bay Area colonize its neighbors. Rather, it’s a mega-rethinking so that planning and development enable the Megaregion’s pieces—Bay Area tech, Sacramento government, Northern San Joaquin Valley trade and logistics, and the Monterey Bay Area’s farming dominance—to magnify each other.

To pick one example, if new state research-and-development tax credits were to target inland companies, an infusion of technology and investment could allow the Northern San Joaquin to make its logistics industry much less polluting in terms of greenhouse gases as it moves the vegetables of the Salinas Valley to market, perhaps through expanded ports in Stockton, West Sacramento, or Oakland.

The think tank report and its co-author, Jeff Bellisario, a man whose colleagues call him “Mr. Megaregion,” offer dozens of similarly transformative ideas. The Northern California Megaregion could create a “more distributed high tech sector,” with more companies, and more jobs inland, by better connecting universities, laboratories, and research institutions with local entrepreneurs.

Imagine, if the center of gravity in Northern California shifted southeast, landing in the fast-growing Tri-Valley, which includes the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and San Ramon. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, better linked with entrepreneurs and investment, could be a jobs hub that turns into something of a megaregional capital.

Such planning should be performed by new economic development entities that extend across the entire Megaregion; companies that now leave the Bay Area for Austin in search of cost savings might be redirected to Sacramento or Santa Cruz. Such an effort would be strengthened if Bay Area entities jointly lobbied Sacramento to improve education outside the Bay Area. Only half of the people in the Monterey and Northern San Joaquin areas have had some type of post-high school education, as opposed to 70 percent in the Bay Area proper.

The report shows such investments could spin off literally hundreds of new ideas. My favorite: The Megaregion could have its own…well, I’ll call it a Nerd Army of overeducated consultants, or, in the report’s words, “a megaregional corps of consulting post-docs and advanced graduate students” that could be dispatched to solve regional problems and prepare local talent for higher-skill jobs.

Of course, making such a shift would require a well-integrated set of transportation connections from one end of the Megaregion to the other. The goal would be to get trucks and commuters off the hellish 80, 580, and 101 corridors, making it easier for the state to hit its targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

Suggested changes include more service on Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor between San Jose and Placer County, an extension of rail service to Salinas, and support of planned expansions of the ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) train down to Modesto and Merced and up to Sacramento. (Political note: The gas tax increase, on the November ballot for repeal, produces $900 million for these ACE expansions.) And all these changes, in turn, would make the actual completion of high-speed rail more urgent, since the first segment, extended from Bakersfield to San Jose, would connect with this expanded Megaregional transit system.

It is easy to mock such mega-visions. For years, real estate interests have broadcast silly promotions, like touting a major housing development in San Joaquin County as being in the “Far East Bay.” (Local joke: Is that nearer Singapore or Hong Kong?)

But if the Megaregion could harness its joint economic and lobbying power, much of this seems possible. It could even inspire imitators. Could Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas further integrate into their own Megaregional triangle? And might they throw Tijuana and Mexicali into their planning mix as well?

If it built a record of success, the Northern California Megaregion could expand, connecting to planning efforts in the troubled Northstate, and even extending down the San Joaquin Valley to California’s fifth-largest city.

Welcome to the Bay Area, Fresno.

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