Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1925: The Year Everything Changed

A talk by Karen Farito at the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Fall Festival 2025

Introduction

2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Jeffers’ Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, and the completion of Hawk Tower. At this year’s Fall Festival, we explored the enduring legacy of these two milestones and celebrated the recent designation of Tor House as a National Historic Landmark. At the Lectures and Presentations given on October 4th, we began with three presentations that provided a wide-ranging review of what was happening globally in 1925, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, and at Tor House. This second talk by Karen Farlito describes the evolution of Carmel and surrounding land that made it the international attraction that it is today. Prepare to be fascinated by the changes that Robinson Jeffers witnessed in 1925 as he was completing his amazing Hawk Tower.

For insights into what was happening in the USA and globally in 1925, read Professor Richard Kezirian’s blog post.

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Imagine a place where famous writers lived in shacks on the beach, where there were no street addresses, no sidewalks, no streetlights—and definitely no rules about what your house should look like. A place where you could build whatever crazy artistic vision popped into your head.

That was Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1920. A wild, bohemian paradise where rebels and artists fled after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Carmel-by-the-Sea

Around 1920s, Public Domain. No restrictions on use.

But then came 1925. And in that single year, everything changed.

By the end of 1925, this bohemian paradise had become... well, pretty much what you see today when you visit Carmel. Regulated. Beautiful. Expensive. Safe.

The question is: How did that happen? And what did they lose-or gain-in the process?"

"Let me paint you a picture of what happened in this one pivotal year.

THE SIGN ORDINANCE REVOLUTION
In 1925, Carmel passed what might be the most important piece of legislation in the city's history: a sign ordinance. Now, that sounds boring, right? But here's what it really meant:

For the first time, the government said: 'We're going to control what this place looks like.' Every non-conforming sign had to go. No more wild, crazy advertising. No visual chaos. Only the Carmel Drugstore sign was left.  Primarily to show what Carmel-by-the-Sea could have looked like without the sign ordinance.

Original Carmel Drug Store Signage

This wasn't just about signs-it was the city saying: 'We're going to be beautiful on purpose.'

THE VISION STATEMENT
That same year, they adopted an official vision: Carmel would be 'primarily, essentially and predominantly a residential community.'

Think about how radical that was in 1925 America. Most cities were racing to become industrial, commercial, bigger, faster. Carmel said: 'No. We're going to stay small, residential, and charming.'

That one decision shaped everything you see in Carmel today."

"But 1925 wasn't just about regulation-it was about massive growth of the area. Three enormous real estate developments were completed that year, essentially tripling the size of the Carmel sphere of influence.

THE THREE EXPANSIONS:

• Carmel Point: Premium oceanfront lots

• Hatton Fields: 233 acres with the magnificent Flanders Mansion as a model home

• Carmel Woods: 125 acres of forested residential lots

Flanders’ Mansion 1925

Here's what's fascinating: They were expanding rapidly while simultaneously imposing strict aesthetic controls. Growth AND preservation at the same time.

And it worked! Paul Flanders built his mansion in 1925 as a showcase for what Carmel could become. The city was so proud of it, they eventually bought it themselves in 1972.

This is where Carmel invented something new: the idea that a city government could actively manage beauty, not just basic services."

THE ARCHITECTURAL REVOLUTION
"Now here's where the story gets really fun. While all this planning and regulation was happening, a guy named Hugh Comstock was building the most whimsical, rule-breaking houses you've ever seen.

HUGH COMSTOCK'S FAIRY TALE YEAR
Comstock had zero formal architectural training. But in 1925, he completed some of his most famous fairy tale cottages:

• The Obers House-a storybook masterpiece

• The Lincoln Green Inn-five cottages inspired by Robin Hood

• Multiple residential cottages that looked like they belonged in a Brothers Grimm tale

• Steep, dramatic rooflines. Arched doorways. Windows that seemed to wink at you. Houses that looked like they were built by elves.

Hansel, a Comstock Fairytale Cottage

copyright (c) Linda Hartong

Here's the beautiful irony: At the exact moment Carmel was becoming regulated and controlled, it was also becoming more whimsical and magical than ever before.

The Seven Arts Building went up that same year-the first major retail building. So you had practical commerce AND fantasy architecture happening simultaneously.

That tension-between order and whimsy, regulation and creativity-that's the DNA of modern Carmel."

THE CULTURAL SHIFT
"But something else was happening in 1925 that was bittersweet.

THE END OF BOHEMIAN CARMEL
George Sterling-the magnetic poet who had basically founded bohemian Carmel-was in his final year. He'd been the beating heart of the artist colony since 1906. Wild parties, artistic rebellion, creative freedom. By 1925, his style of poetry was becoming old-fashioned. The world was moving toward modernism. Sterling was struggling with relevance, with alcohol, with the changing times.

Meanwhile, Robinson Jeffers was rising. More respectable, nationally recognized, building his famous stone house, Tor House.

Hawk Tower at Tor House

Completed by Robinson Jeffers in 1925

THE ARTS AND CRAFTS CLUB TRIUMPH
That same year, the Arts and Crafts Club-founded by Elsie Allen in 1905-achieved something remarkable: They bought the Forest Theater. This wasn't just a real estate transaction. This was the community saying: 'We're going to institutionalize our arts scene. Make it permanent, professional, sustainable.' But they also stopped holding their annual art exhibitions. The Pine Cone newspaper editor wrote a front-page editorial saying Carmel desperately needed a real art gallery.

Success was making them respectable. And respectability was changing who they were."

WHAT WAS LOST
"So what happened to the bohemians?

• Some died-Sterling took his own life in 1926, less than a year after our story.

• Some left for new creative frontiers.

• Some got absorbed into the very institutions they'd once rebelled against.

• Some, like Jeffers, became the establishment.

By 1925, Carmel had become regulated, respectable, and commercially successful-everything the original bohemians had fled San Francisco to escape. The 1925 sign ordinance perfectly symbolized this transformation: from creative chaos to managed beauty. They saved the village. But did they kill the soul?"

THE PARADOX AND TAKEAWAY
"Here's what I think happened in 1925:

• Carmel figured out how to be itself on purpose.

• They looked at what the bohemians had accidentally created—this magical, beautiful, artistic village—and they said: 'How do we keep this forever?'

• Their answer was revolutionary: Municipal aesthetic control. Beauty as civic policy. Charm as community responsibility.

The paradox is profound: They preserved the physical beauty and artistic character that creative rebellion had built. But they lost the rebellious spirit that made that beauty possible in the first place.

Today, when you walk through Carmel's fairy tale streets, you're walking through the results of 1925's great experiment: What happens when a community decides to be magical on purpose?

The answer is all around us. Gorgeous. Regulated. Preserved.

Whether that's triumph or tragedy-well, that depends on what you value most: the beauty, or the wildness that created it.

Karen Ferlito

Karen Ferlito is an environmental and community activist and a trustee of the Tor House Foundation. A former member of the Carmel City Council and the Forest and Beach Commission, Karen has held leadership positions in several local institutions, including president of the Friends of Mission Trail Nature Preserve and president of the Big Sur Land Trust's board of directors.

This Sacred Place

Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, President, Tor House Foundation

           The Tor House gardens have been spectacular this year.  As I write this, looking out over those gardens from the second story of the East Wing, a covey of quail darts along the brick patio, adults and chicks so numerous and moving so quickly that I can’t count them. They disappear into the sweet alyssum, geranium, stasis, rose campion, that section of garden close to the graves of the house-dogs, True Winnie Darling and Dear Haig.  

            As if on cue, a hawk—a red-tail I would guess—glides quickly across my view, appearing from behind Hawk Tower and disappearing behind Tor House.

            Even without the people that normally animate Tor House—the visitors from as nearby as down the street in Carmel to as far away as Brunswick, Maine, Holmestrand, Norway and Beijing, China; the tour docents revealing the wonders of Tor House to these visitors; the flower, music, archival, bookstore, and special occasion docents—even without this flow of people, Tor House and Hawk Tower are filled with life.

            Not just life from the profusion of flowers and birds.  When I do my solitary rounds of the property, checking to make certain all is in order, I never feel alone.  There is something more, something that gives Tor House the distinctive quality that almost everyone who visits experiences.

            I recently came upon On the Memory of Stone:  A Tor House Legacy by poet Sherod Santos.  The text of a talk Santos gave at the 1994 Fall Festival, the chapbook was from the collection of Marina Romani, a tour docent for many years and a dear friend, who died earlier this year.  Her son donated her library to Tor House, and it was while looking through the box of Jeffers-related books that I found the little volume.

            In On the Memory of Stone, Santos talks “about the experience of living for several years, from high school on, in close proximity to the Jeffers house,” as well as “the influence that Jeffers’ lingering presence exerted on my decision to become a poet.”  But he also talks about stone, and what he discovers about its nature.

            If I’m not making too much of this, it might be said that in Jeffers’
            cosmology a stone is infused with the abiding presences of the past,
            the present, and the future.  And the person who bends to pick one
            up draws that stone out of the river of time, attaching to it some
            other memory—like the warm spring evening when Robin and Una,
            on a walk around the tower in Galway that had once belonged to 
            Yeats, picked up a small rock from beside its walls.  Time, Jeffers 
            knew, is written in stone, and taking that rock home…proved a way
            of adding time to time, memory to memory, like water poured into
            water:  the geologic time of the stone itself; the historical time of
            the tower; the personal time of Robin and Una’s walk together in
            the presence of a poet whom both of them loved.  And then, of course,
            we too, visitors to Tor House, all add our own dimension of time 
            when we come to touch, mindfully or not, that small stone fragment
            on the rain-washed paving near the West Wing of the Jeffers house.

            “…it seems to me,” Santos continues, “that one might rightly consider the Jeffers house a sacred place,” 
            For what is our definition of a sacred place, except some location inhabited
            by living presences, some location where people feel summoned back to a
            clear coherence between time, and space, and some larger collective: for
            Jeffers, the combined imagination of nature and humankind alike.

            Every time I come to Tor House, I feel the sacredness of this place.  As I walk through the deserted gardens and the empty rooms, I sense the “living presences,” whether in the histories of the stones—imagine the pudding stones, taken from Una’s family farm in Mason, Michigan, embedded in the east wall of Tor House, two billion years old!; or in the poetry—“sometimes harder than granite”—that lives everywhere on site; or in the people whose spirits populate this place: those of “the brown people who…/Built fires…and nestled” by Thuban, a cornerstone of the house; Jeffers’, “a dark one, deep in the granite;” Marina’s, a light one, at the top of Hawk Tower reading one last poem to her tour group under open sky.

            “The living presences” of Tor House continually summon us back to this sacred place at continent’s end.  In this time of sheltering in place, best to learn “the extraordinary patience of things.”  We will return, one day, like Una, for whom,

                                                 Only the home-coming
                        To our loved rock over the gray and ageless Pacific
                        Makes her such joy.

Photographs by Melinda Manlin

Quotes from Jeffers’ poems “It is a pity the shock waves,” “To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House,” “Tor House,” “Carmel Point,” and “Hungerfield,” and from Sherod Santos, On the Memory of Stone:  A Tor House Legacy.  Foothills Publishing: Bath, New York.  1996.