At 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, the ground moved for the better part of a minute and San Francisco stopped existing as anyone had known it. More than two hundred thousand people were homeless; the bohemian cafés were rubble. For a remarkable number of writers and painters the answer was simple: follow Sterling. Mary Austin came and wrote in a treehouse she called the Wickiup. Jack London came and went. The photographer Arnold Genthe came, and the MacGowan sisters, and Jimmy Hopper. An Arts and Crafts Club, formed in 1905, gave them all something to argue about. By 1910 the San Francisco Call could report that sixty percent of the houses in Carmel had been built by people devoting their lives to the aesthetic arts, and that year Herbert Heron carved an outdoor stage out of the woods and called it the Forest Theater. When the village incorporated on October 31, 1916, the poets ran the council — Heron and the writer Perry Newberry would both serve as mayor — and they had chosen unpaved streets, tents and rough cottages over everything a real city offered.
The cottages came from the same instinct. In 1924 Hugh Comstock, a young man with no architectural training, built a small playhouse in the woods for his wife Mayotta's rag dolls and called it Hansel. Neighbors wanted one. Gretel followed in 1925, the Tuck Box tea room in 1926, and over the next few years a couple dozen more — rolled eaves, chimneys that lean on purpose, windows that don't quite line up, stone laid as if by a giant's careless hand. He had invented a style, Tudor Storybook, and the village took it as its own face. A few streets over, on the granite of Carmel Point, a poet and his family were hauling boulders up from the shore by hand to build Tor House (1919) and then Hawk Tower, a small stone keep with a secret stair, finished in 1924 — the other great handmade house of the same decade, now a National Historic Landmark.
Why People Visit Carmel-by-the-Sea
- Relax on Carmel Beach, a broad crescent of pale sand backed by wind-flattened Monterey cypress and famous sunset silhouettes.
- Stretch farther south along Carmel River State Beach to where the Carmel River meets the Pacific — a quieter dog-friendly stretch with bird-watching at the lagoon.
- Explore Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, with granite coves, sea lions, otters, and easy trails above turquoise water.
- Find the Comstock storybook cottages — Hansel, Gretel, and the Tuck Box — on a self-guided fairytale walk through the village lanes.
- Tour the Carmel Mission Basilica (Mission San Carlos Borromeo), with its basilica, museum rooms, and gardens set within sandstone and adobe walls.
- Visit Tor House and Hawk Tower at Carmel Point, the hand-built stone home of poet Robinson Jeffers, open for docent-led tours.
- Browse Ocean Avenue's courtyards, galleries, and flower-lined passages, then walk Scenic Road along the cliffs above the surf.
