Note: Here’s a very sentimental piece I wrote about El Granada a long time ago…some of the things I describe may not be around anymore.
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A recent [see “note” above] walk past tall apartment buildings on Avenue Alhambra in El Granada–where a concrete slab is all that remains of the Ocean Shore Railroad–led me to reflect on the first buildings that appeared some 83 years ago.
In 1910 the 38-mile long railroad was running daily from San Francisco to Tunitas Glen, south of Half Moon Bay. The iron road closely paralleled Highway 1, which was to come some 40 years later. Two attractive, but strikingly different train stations were constructed. Until then prime agricultural land captured the eye, much of it farmed by Dante Dianda, the “Artichoke King.” Otherwise, the narrow strip of marine terrace, bordered by mountains and sea, was almost devoid of structures.
One station stood at the northern end of El Granada. Shot from afar, a vintage photo of the station is framed by endless rows of healthy artichokes, an artful contrast of man’s work with a farmer’s bountiful produce.
Another station stood near Avenue Portola; the building was later moved to accommodate a club, then a private residence.
Some people talk of three stations in El Granada. That’s because the Ocean Shore also built a platform used to store wood and other construction materials in southern El Granada. I guess some riders got off there, too.
Subdividing El Granada seemed like a good idea after the horrific 1906 earthquake and fire. El Granada was close to San Francisco but hard to get to because of the unforgiving geographical barriers. Fearing more earthshaking, and wanting to get away from it, city dwellers looked to other communities. Perhaps they were unaware that the moody fault line cut through the Coastside as well.
It [the sea] strewed beach wood everywhere and created the aquarium-like pools flowering with anemone and garnished with kelp and sea urchins.
Big-faced capazoni, like Chinese fish-kites, prowled the reefs. Swift cod of many colors swam deep, and flashing silver schools awoke the sea birds and fishermen to intense activity.
The sea held the fog and the coolness, and never were the coastland people unaware of its pervasive presence.
The mountains, the sea, the indifferent access, kept this slender coastal plain apart in time and in ways of life for years. It acquired a serene and unspectacular beauty.
Houses and barns turned weather grey. Moss formed golden green patina on the roofs and fences. Thick hedges of cypress and eucalyptus, intended as windbreaks, helped compose pictures so lovely no artist could pass them by.
Glimpses down steep gullies to the blue or the froth of waves intensified the color. The warm greens of the varied brush was dusted in gold by yellow flowers–the lupin, the wormwood and the primrose.
With a sad heart one sees the change. A new day cannot be denied. Old shingles are replaced with tin or corrugated roofing. Trees are ruthlessly cut. The lovely curves of old roads are lost. A painter feels a desperation to record what is left, what is passing so fast.
This San Mateo, this Saint Matthew’s land, was rich and old when most of California was raw and unknown. The Spaniard had here achieved a courtesy, a hospitality, a serenity almost without historic compare.
There are times, moments, when we still may feel this enduring magic. Try it. Walk in the warm deserted canyons as October sun makes Indian summer. You will feel the spell, more tangible than dream.
In glades that have not changed at all, the centuries drop away. The day and the mood of Spain are here.
Quail leap up and take flight. The muted thunder of their wings becomes the mutter of Spanish drums. Along fence rows the pomp and glory and hope of a vanished empire stand in its bannered colors.
In purple and gold, the dusty ranks of aster and goldenrod ask remembrance of the birthday of our homeland. With joyful hearts we answer and celebrate and a strange benediction is ours and a renewed love of our heritage.
The galleons had long given way to a new ship, the clipper. These now came in an endless stream to San Francisco. The ocean that fought these fast ships for the months-long voyage of the Horn, sometimes seized them on the very doorstep of their arrival.
The cargoes of these wrecks became a part of the sea-bordering life. Pescadero folk salvaged so much white lead from the stranded Columbia that the town was known as the whitest in California.
from the wreck of the Sir John Franklin, extravagant furniture for the gaudy hotels of San Francisco’s tenderloin district, fell into the hands of the Steele family. The New York provided tea and ginger, the Ridal Hall silk thread.
In a happier mood the waves cast countless thousands of sea shells upon the sand. They ranged from ponderous abalone to fragile translucent fan shells. The sea polished myriads of pebbles and left them in shoals at Pebble Beach and Columbia Beach.
No one knew what shooter Cho Seung-Hui was doing during the two hours in between the two shootings (the first in a dorm, the second in classrooms) at Virginia Tech. Cops couldn’t find him.
Now we know how Cho spent the two hours between the two shootings–mailing photographs, videos and a manifesto, to NBC News in New York. This tells me that this crazy guy was on a mission–he was programmed for his mission. He was methodical, he gave no thought to anything but the mission upon which he focussed all of his energy.
He had powerful tunnel vision.
Witnesses say that Cho was strange–he wore sunglasses in classes, he hid his face, he made no eye contact; other students felt so uncomfortable around him in classes that they wanted him kicked out.
But aren’t the sunglasses, the unusual clothing and the anti-personality a key to who Cho Seung-Hui thought he was–and that was a “star.” By “star”, I mean he clearly, strongly, didn’t believe he was like anyone else and he let everyone know it. He knew he was going to do something shocking and he wanted everyone to remember him.
A brief-lived port at Pigeon Point terminated in a gun duel and bloodshed sharp and ugly as western literature can provide.
Power on land was generally horses. The plowing, hauling, stages and buggies all needed them. Hay growing turned the fields sweet with harvest.
In logging, however, it was the powerful and calm ox that was used. He could pull and he could not be easily upset by the crash of trees and the vicissitudes of timber cutting. These beasts weighed a ton apiece, and though gentle, were terrible to behold.
Portuguese, mostly from the Azores, came early. Some were fishermen, some whalers. At Beluta’s Beach and at the Old Landing they dragged their many-oared boats ashore and relaunched them at the cry “Thar she blows!”
Farming was the mainstay of these gentle people. They were flower lovers and no home had the awful desolation of many midwest houses of that period. Instead they were embowered in over-running roses, nasturium, geranium and fuchsia. In the fields they planted the horse bean and the pea.
The harvests went on in the wet fogs of summer. If the palaces of the eastern hills had much of the Renaissance and the baroque about them, these harvesters, standing or kneeling in wet, glistening oilskins, recreated the tableau of Millet’s “Angelus”. This was a humble land and a gentle folk.
A salute to the flexible and heroic people of the new age, who seemingly are not obviously discouraged.
Let us return to a land whose semi-isolation is taking longer for the fairy wand of progress to bring its ambivalent magic.
Over the western ridge lies the narrow coastal shelf, the land of the sea. It is green always and cool forever. And its ways have been paced and slow.
Its people look out on the sea. The sea and the sea world are never apart from them.
Long before the brothers of St. Francis had worn the Camino, the coast had known of the Spaniard.
Indians, crouched about a smoky clam bake or mussel feed had seen strange apparitions pass in the mist to seaward. High awkward shapes, but buoyant as sea birds. They were the Manila galleons of Spain.
Before Drake and not long after Magellan, these ships were taking short-circle route, making landfall near the Columbia’s mouth. Hence to La Paz, to take on Loreto’s pearls and tranship at Panama.
They skirted the coast closely, but with the Spanish distaste for fog, they did not land. A century would pass before they would come to California.
It was the Franciscan brothers, Serra, Palou and Lasuen, who came, with conversion of the heathen Indian as their intention. Missions were started. The Camino became well marked and well travelled long before these sun lovers accepted the coast as a home.
Spanish grants were allotted. Many passed intact through the Mexican days.
Presently disappointed gold diggers moved to the coastal land, and then the Scots, irish and occasional German. Mostly from Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska and Kansas, sometimes Kentucky and Tennessee, they were imaginative and enterprising folk.
Roads of a primitive sort soon were built. Sawmills were set up, stores opened and steamer landings constructed. A very active period began. San Francisco was hungry–for everything. Lumber, grain, potatoes, cheese and butter.
Little steam schooneers landed at the Old Landing (Princeton), at the New Landing or Amesport (Miramar) or lay to anchor at Gordon’s Chute (Tunitas). Just beyond the county, and used by Pescadero ranchers, was Davenport.
…How We Survived Economically During the 1960s in Princeton….Story By Fayden
There is a little bit of road that runs from the corner of Broadway
in Princeton towards the water. One little cottage surrounded by trees stands on the corner; there is a house on the water with a garage next to it and a large vacant lot.
The house on the water stands across the way from the Harbor House. Before the Harbor House, there was a large hull of a wrecked boat on the spot, maybe one piece forty feet in length that faced the water.
The cabin was water tight, and this is where we used to go to inhale those forbidden herbs and drink our brews that made our words slur while we watched storms blow right on over us and away.
The creek that runs behind all these little houses cuts it off from the store fronts of Princeton, so in some ways it was an island unto itself within the otherwise barbaric mentality of late sixties/early seventies âPrinceton- by- the- Seaâ? (we never called it that though).
This little street was an “intellectual” hub of high living within the otherwise physically and mentally crazed overt nature of fishermen,boat builders, and abalone divers. Now, I have built boats, assisted fishermen fishing, and ran the compressors to the long lines of abalone divers, however I still claim to be one of the terminally unique intellectuals that dwelled on this tiny strip of land off Broadway.
Doc (we called him âDocâ? because he used three syllable words a lot) lived in the corner house surrounded by old cypress trees, and worked for United Airlines as a mechanic of some sort. We considered him to be the most stable of all of us because he earned a straight wage every week from a large industry. He was also the only person to have a car without dents and half rusted. Doc was always inviting people in and we appreciated this because except for Doc, Manuel and Sally, we all lived in campers. Small little boxes with even smaller little windows that created large flaring tempers when one got cabin fever.
There was an old black man named Isaac who claimed to be a hundred years old, and he would come over and drink, and tell stories at Docs. Isaac was a local born and lived his life in Half Moon Bay. On hindsight I don’t know if Isaac was a hundred years old but he told really great stories, and it allowed us to sit still and honor him in this way.
He probably just enjoyed watching us get pie eyed and slowly list fifteen degrees as we listened.
Manuel and Sally lived at the other end of the street (across from the old boat, remember) Manuel made beautiful abalone jewelry. He was an older man than us, maybe in his fifties and he rarely wore much more than a pair of shorts. He kinda reminded me of Jacques Cousteau with a pony tail. Manuel would cut the abalone on a water wheel, wearing a scuba tank to breathe with, while doing it. I guess the dust almost killed him doing it without the tank once.
Sally just kind of ran around in the background keeping the house together or chasing her two- year- old daughter who was eternally naked. They were the first San Francisco street vendors I ever met; they’d make the jewelry, then go up to the city around Ghiradelli Square to sell it.
Mickey lived in the two-car garage next to the house that Manuel and
Sally lived in. About a year earlier he had left his wife and kids in Moss Beach. Perhaps Mickey was the most creative man I ever knew;
it seemed he would take on just about any challenge mechanically and
could make it work.
Or he’d already know how to build just about anything wood,or metal, and well, too! He taught me taught me the zen of building, that every project was simply a puzzle, and my job was to make the favorable parts that put it together. It was also mandatory in this âMickey- zenâ? to be happy while I/we did anything, or else it wasnât worth doing.
Mick also was an advocate for beginning the âRoyal American Marijuana
Air Force.â? The RAMAF plan was to collect all the seeds we could and then
drop them everywhere from a small airplane we would use from the HMB
airport. It never became a reality but we sure loved to muse over
the concept!!
During storms, before the inner break water was built, some of the
boats would lose their moorings and blow up on the shore. The
unlucky ones hit the rocks, shattered and broke up to the point where they couldnât be repaired, right in front of their unhappy ownerâs eyes!
One of these unfortunate crafts came up on a little beach between
Hazelâs restaurant (now Barbaras Fishtrap) and the rocks to the north
of Hazelâs. The wrecked boat had been abandoned for a few months when Mickey discovered it had a solid stainless steel gas tank about
three- feet- tall, nine- feet- wide, and about a foot thick, running the
full amid ship of it. We decided to cut the tank free using some
handsaws and then we’d float it out at high tide. Of course to add
to the intrigue, this all had to be done in the dark as we were never
sure of the legality of anything we did.
And so we commenced, the saws sawed, the water rose, we pushed it out of the now really wrecked boat and it fell on its side into the water. We grabbed two paddles and rowed it over to the end of Johnson pier, hauled it up onto the back of my truck and were now the “new” proud owners of a big, shiny stainless steel gas tank!
And so we commenced, the saws sawed, the water rose, we pushed it out of the now really wrecked boat and it fell on its side into the water. We grabbed two paddles and rowed it over to the end of Johnson pier, hauled it up onto the back of my truck and were now the “new” proud owners of a big, shiny stainless steel gas tank!
We decided to chain it up to a telephone pole in front of Mickeyâs
garage facing Broadway and painted on it “STAINLESS STEEL TANK
$150.00.â?
A couple of months passed and we didn’t have any takers so we crossed out the $150.00 and painted in a new higher price: $250.00.
Another month went by and still nobody bought it so we crossed out the $250.00 written just below the $150.00 and put an even higher new price of $350.00. About two days later a man came by, looked it over, checked the tank carefully for problems and was successful in talking us down to $300.00. He never asked about the other two prices and we never explained them!
The same day we cut loose the stainless steel tank, we liberated another gas tank in another wrecked boat but this one was only 60 gallons and it wasnât stainless steel. We couldn’t lift it up the cliff so we emptied the gas into the sand. Mickey didn’t want to pollute the water so once we got to the top of the cliff he dropped a lit match on the newly poured gas. Powwoummmm! The biggest little atomic bomb replica I ever have seen before or since came to life right before my eyes. This flame was followed by a mushroom cloud the height of the twelve- foot cliff and the Eucalyptus trees on top of it.
Needless to say we ran like hell and commenced to watch every Sheriffâs car on the Coastside rolling up and down the streets in Princeton looking for whatever the heck had just occurred.
