Scrooge City? : Carmel Struggles Against Outside Intrusions but Thrives on Money That Droves of Tourists Spend

Tacked up in one of this village’s carefully quaint candy shops, where a single satisfying mouthful of truffled chocolate can set you back $2, is a telling cartoon:

Two old fishermen caper down the main street of a seaport village shouting: “The sardines are back! The sardines are back!” Tourists in the souvenir shops, which long since replaced fishing as the local industry, stare at them in puzzlement.

Carmel-By-The-Sea, fabled for what it doesn’t have rather than what it has--no neon, no street lights, no house numbers--is going through a civic identity crisis. It is a square-mile town plagued by its own paradoxes:

- Carmel prides itself on its heritage as a vital artistic Mecca, but few struggling artists can take up residence when even flimsy, aging cottages can cost nearly $300,000. Most residents are well-to-do retirees who buy art, rather than create it.

- It often snubs the thousands of tourists who clog its rustic streets, providing only one convenient public toilet. Yet the tourist millions keep Carmel prospering and property taxes low.

- It cherishes its privacy--a man once won a City Council seat campaigning to “Keep Carmel Off the Map”--yet no one could pretend that its 5,000 residents could support its nearly 40 art galleries and two-score restaurants.

Rugged Individuality

Carmel, founded on rugged individuality--it was once advertised as “cut-rate Utopia for Bohemians in search of a rural Eden”--must now regulate its quaintness and strictly enforce its rusticity.

Again and again, the quandary resurfaces: how to accommodate the tourist hordes who pay many of the city’s bills without destroying the charm and character of the very thing they came to see.

Says Marjory Lloyd, a Carmelite since 1932 and one-time editor of the local newspaper, The Carmel Pine Cone: “The ironical thing is that the citizens have fought for years to preserve the beauty and character of community, and it’s reaped the results of people wanting to see it.”

“The biggest criticism leveled against the city is it’s stuffy or over-regulated, any definition to create this as an elitist community,” said Dave Maradei, city councilman, postmaster and an 8-year Carmel resident. “It’s anything but. Residents are just concerned about maintaining the quality of life.”

Scrooge City

To the outside world, the fuss arose this summer when TV networks flashed the 10-second news that Carmel, Scrooge City, was outlawing ice cream cones. Annoyed at the publicity, city fathers and mothers countered by dispensing free ice cream cones at a “Lick-In.”

Carmel hadn’t actually outlawed cones at that point. A 15-year lease for a Swensen’s Ice Cream shop and Orange Julius outlet was expiring, to the ill-concealed delight of some. The new lessee wanted a permit for a shoe store and an ice cream parlor in back with carry-out cones.

For three months the city wavered over granting the necessary permits. They cited water usage concerns (the entire Monterey Peninsula is under drought restrictions), but the businessmen say the new shops would need less water than the existing ones. Late Friday, the City Council finally turned down the application.

The water issue is “absolutely a total red herring,” said lessee Michael Montana, who owns several Carmel businesses and heads the county grand jury. “They just bushwhacked us. . . . We want to do business (in Carmel) because it is the way it is. We don’t want to change it.”

“We’re not trying to put in McDonald’s,” said James Newhouse, Montana’s attorney. The pair even found an ice cream spillage expert and submitted his four-page letter on cone breakage rates. “Some little old lady who’s lived here 50 years (told Newhouse) she followed cone eaters three blocks to see if they dripped. They didn’t.”

The city also cited dignity and neatness in its cone-free stand. A $1 tourist brochure published privately--the town has no Chamber of Commerce--warns in bold capital letters: “EATING ON THE STREET IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED.”

One city report warned that street eating means that a “high-quality ambiance” is “replaced by a carnival atmosphere,” although the town’s bakeries sell exotic babas aux rhum and chocolate croissants to visitors who thunder daily off tour buses.

But Montana thinks the city’s efforts are Draconian. “They’d like to roll back the clock and make it literally like it was in 1910,” he said. “Rich people had cabins for the weekend, artists came and painted pictures and wrote books. . . . I think they’re looking out for the best interest of the village, but they occasionally get a little self-righteous.”

Must Put Up With It

Alma Lou Tinsley of Antelope Valley, enjoying a chocolate cone on a break from a nearby religious convention, agreed. “If they want the tourist business, they’re gonna have to put up with the ice cream cones,” she said briskly.

This is not new to Carmel. Decades ago, a city attorney wanted to build a wall around the town. In the 1930s Sinclair Lewis warned, “Don’t let the Babbitts take over Carmel.” In the last 25 years, civic-minded citizens like Fredrick Farr, a former state senator whose personally signed Ansel Adams prints attest to his Carmel credentials, have seen the boom coming and worked to insulate Carmel from it.

He helped preserve poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House here and led a battle that saved 155 acres of artichoke farmland near Carmel from builders. A quarter of a million dollars was raised for the campaign to save the artichoke farmland, and donations ranged from a 12-year-old boy collecting $125 at a card table to a druggist giving 10 cents for each pill bottle returned.

It is a tradition Farr is proud of. “Carmel is at the forefront of doing many things,” he said.

Civic Pique Not New

Civic pique isn’t new, either. A furious artist once threw a potted geranium at a councilman. In the columns of the Pine Cone, letter-writers do inky battle. Art Black wrote: “For a city whose primary industry is tourism, we sure treat the tourists shabbily. Even the smallest European town has adequate public rest rooms. When is Carmel going to realize that the tourist is the primary source of income that provides the level of services we Carmelites are so accustomed to?”

Donald Lampson penned: “Carmel-By-The-Sea has the proud history of being an artists’ colony. We like to see beauty. This does not include an otherwise pretty young woman walking down the street with her tongue hanging four inches out of her mouth wrapped around an ice cream cone. . . . Personally, I don’t think they’ve gone far enough. I think for the same reason, chewing gum should be outlawed in Carmel. . . . Neither do anyone any good anyway. Power to the people.”

The most defiant man in town is businessman Paul Laub, who first saw Carmel when he was at Ft. Ord in 1967, long after the era when enlisted men were escorted out of Carmel at sundown. Over one of his stores hangs the “Don’t Tread On Me” serpent banner, “my war flag,” he says.

By genteel Carmel standards, Laub--whom the local paper calls the “gentleman gadfly”--does everything wrong. When his antique store floundered, he opened the town’s first T-shirt shop in 1975 (“Real people like T-shirts,” he says), which added galling insult to injury by staying open late, on Sundays and holidays, and making lots of money.

His store pioneered many Carmel-stamped souvenirs, although there is now competition from places like a discreet dime store, where even Carmel-marked Frisbees can be bought--although not used in the city park. A sign expressly forbids them there.

“They claim it’s a place where artists and others can live,” Laub said, “but they won’t let the little guy in. Businessmen are an oppressed minority in Carmel.”

Maradei, who sometimes plays racquetball with Laub, volleys back: “Uses like T-shirt shops do not seem appropriate to the character of this community. That is not to say they are not profitable, (but they are) degrading the very thing they’re making money off of.”

After Friday’s vote rejecting ice cream cones, Maradei triumphantly said: “We stopped the T-shirt shop proliferation, thank God. But we have to keep up our guard.”

City’s Best Interest

But Laub loves Carmel too: “I could sell ice cream in my store if I wanted to, but that’s not what I want,” Laub said. “I don’t want what they don’t want, more than they don’t want it! If this town went downhill, I would suffer.”

Tourists themselves have changed.

“It’s become a day-tripping place,” said Lloyd, who shocked friends by admitting she is fond of the “kaleidoscope of color” the tourists bring to Ocean Avenue. Merchants tell her that the leisurely, lavish visitor-shopper is outnumbered by the two-hour tourist with a thin wallet.

Their numbers make up for it. There is, Maradei said, “no question that we have a comfortable budget, thanks in part to tourism. But if we didn’t have tourism, we wouldn’t have the extra costs we’ve incurred. It’s a dichotomy--the more tourists who come here, the more it costs us to run the community.”

The quiet quaintness brings them all, swelling the Carmel population fivefold on weekends. And they grapple with the same parking problems that locals have. Meter maids stripe the tires of parked cars with yellow chalk and issue tickets doggedly. Years ago, one outraged Carmelite defiantly parked his horse in town, and the police chalked it too.

‘Storybook Town’

Some are aware of the problem they contribute to. Bridgit Thieriot, 25, was down from San Francisco for a Carmel friend’s wedding. “It’s like a storybook town,” she said, “like something out of a fairy tale out of your childhood, foggy and mystical. It’s too bad there are so many tourists. But I guess anything with atmosphere, people want to see it.”

Behind the deceptively idyllic facade, the town has changed too. “It has changed from, shall we say, a community where artists and musicians and writers worked to really a status community for retired people,” Lloyd said. The local joke is that Carmel is for the newlywed and the nearly dead. Cars bedecked with tissue-paper garlands do nuzzle up to cozy inns, and the 5,086-plus post office boxes overflow monthly with Social Security checks.

To tourists who browse in her real estate office, “the culture shock is unbelievable,” Carla Belgrano Ramsey said. “They think they’ll pick up a little business for a couple hundred thousand and find it’s a million-plus.”

But the most discouraged man in Carmel is not a visitor, a big businessman or a city big shot.

‘That Was My Dream’

He is Steve Croswell, who has managed the Orange Julius for 15 years. He is a volunteer fireman. He coached in the Little League (though there are few children in Carmel now), and he is a six-gallon Red Cross blood donor.

“That was my dream, having a little restaurant in Carmel,” he said as he swabbed the counter. “I didn’t know they hated franchises. Carmel blames the sins of the world on fast food. They’re not looking at me as a person, they’re looking at me as Orange Julius.”

For 15 years, he has dutifully controlled his customers’ trash. He conscientiously closes at 6 p.m. so as not to encourage transients who linger over one cup of coffee or the loitering high school kids who blow toothpicks through straws into the acoustic ceiling.

And come Oct. 2, he’s out of business. “I’m very sad I’ll be leaving here,” he said “I like the town; I like the work.”

Likes Visitors

He also likes the visitors, even the ones who can only afford a hot dog or an ice cream cone.

In some shops, “you don’t get treated like a customer unless you got your fancy tweed jacket,” he said, “or if you can’t afford their $600 cashmere sweaters.” In his place, they get a smile even if they’re just asking to use the bathroom.

“I’m mad and upset because I’m gonna lose my place,” Crosswell said. “And I know three years down the road someone will wake up and realize they need a hamburger restaurant, and I’ll be long gone.”