Chinatown

Pacific Grove recognizes a Chinese heritage, but that was basically a “Chinatown” fishing settlement that burned down in 1906 when the land owner wanted to convert the property to oceanfront villas. “Chinatown” was at Point Alones, which now holds Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, next to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Chinese fishermen who moved there in the 1850s and ‘60s built wooden shanties in a one-street village that eventually caught as much as 100 tons of squid a year, which was dried on their rooftops and racks that stretched to Lovers Point. The stench was a major concern when the Pacific Improvement Company wanted to subdivide and sell the 30 acres leased to the Chinese. The tenants refused to leave. In May 1906, on a night many of the Chinese were away watching their children graduate from Pacific Grove schools, an explosive fire believed started by coal oil swept through “Chinatown” and the Pacific Grove Volunteer Fire Department found the only hose they brought to fight the fire was slashed and unusable. The next day the property owner put a fence around the area and hired guards to keep the Chinese from rebuilding. Some of the inhabitants from PG"s Chinatown had fled the San Francisco earthquake disaster just weeks before.

Photo: Chinatown procession along Ocean View Boulevard in 1905. Credit:Pacific Grove Museum.

Chinese Settlers

Chinese settlers first arrived in Monterey County in 1851 when a junk that sailed 7,000 miles from southern China drifted into a cove at Point Lobos. Four or five families aboard built wooden houses on the west shore of the cove, one of which still stands and is used as "The Whalers Cabin" museum. The Chinese immigrants fished and harvested abalone for years before some moved to Stillwater Cove in Pebble Beach in 1868 to live on land leased from David Jacks, and some moved to Point Alones in Pacific Grove to help establish a larger fishing village. The village, at a site now filled by Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, thrived for more than three decades as the Chinese fishermen caught tons of squid and dried it for export. It burned to the ground in 1906, in a fire many believe was deliberately set by hostile neighbors.

Local Stanford University Influence

Stanford University connects deeply to the Monterey Peninsula. The most significant link is Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, a world-renowned site for marine biology research and instruction, founded by the university in 1892. Another Stanford/Peninsula connection is "Professors' Row" in Carmel, inaugurated by David Starr Jordan, the school's first president, who built a summer home here in the early 1900s. (One good source says he arrived in 1905; Jordan's memoir, not always reliable about dates, says 1909.) He and his wife Jessie built their cottage at Camino Real and Seventh – an "exquisite spot," he said, where the family spent "many delightful days." A number of Stanford faculty families followed Jordan to the village.

(Photo: Aerial shot of the Hopkins Marine Station.)
( Credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service.)

Julia Platt

(Photo: Julia Platt, undated, removing fence from the bath house area at Lover's Point, from Barlow Geneaology.)

Besides John Steinbeck, who is the most interesting person in the history of Pacific Grove? One candidate is the great Julia B. Platt (1857-1935): scientist, politician, and visionary. A brilliant zoologist, she moved to PG at age 33 to continue her post-doctoral research at Hopkins Marine Station. Try as she might, she could not find a good teaching job anywhere in the country – she was excluded from the halls of science by her gender. "If I cannot obtain the work I wish," she said, "then I must take up with the next best." This, she decided, was civic duty in PG, where she served as mayor, drafted a city charter, re-established public access to Lovers Point by taking an axe to a privately-owned gate, and ushered the creation of a state marine refuge between Point Pinos and Monterey, which made possible one of the world's greatest pedestrian paths.

Julia B. Platt blasted her way to fame in PG by shooting neighbors' chickens who dared to enter her flower garden. After the police were brought in to the dispute, Platt was successful in getting an ordinance passed barring livestock from certain areas of the city.

Before running for mayor, Platt worked to beautify Lover's Point. Tall and formidable, she carried her tools the city down to the Point. As mayor, Platt passed ordinances regulating swim wear and enforcing moral behavior at the bath house area. Before her term ended in 1933 she fought for the concept of "work relief" rather than the "dole", and as a result the Lover's Point area became a WPA project.

Even in her death in 1935, Platt continued to shake things up. As per her wishes, her body was placed in a wicker basket. The city fathers felt obligated, by tradition, to accompany her body out twelve miles in the ocean to her final resting place.