Salinas, California: What's Old is New Again
“The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.” That simple, passive sentence begins John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, East of Eden. Perhaps only Steinbeck could get away with an opening sentence that a high school creative writing teacher would run a red line through. Rules were made to be broken, though, and that’s something the Nobel Prize winner understood. For Steinbeck, East of Eden was to be his greatest novel and a lasting gift to his sons: a rich description of the agricultural land where he grew up.
Salinas, which once reviled Steinbeck for revealing its seamier side in Grapes of Wrath, now celebrates him as a tourist attraction. The National Steinbeck Center, anchoring the north end of what is dubbed Oldtown Salinas, is a Mecca for the author’s fans. Filled with dioramas representing each of Steinbeck’s major works, it at once enlightens with a chronological journey through his life and demonstrates how difficult it is to memorialize an author. Writers, after all, do not invent things or leave behind a legacy of canvasses; they toil alone at typewriters and laptops.
Steinbeck did, however, leave the 1960 GMC camper that carried him on his Travels with Charley. Having satisfied my auto-enthusiast side with that, I set out to discover if Salinas is more than Steinbeck.
The rain fell softly as I wandered the streets of Oldtown. It being Northern California, and winter, this was no surprise. The town suffered devastation from a fire in 1894 and again from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Born in 1902, Steinbeck would have felt the shaking as a young boy. Remarkably, a number of buildings survived both disasters and are in use today.
An Internet café and coffee shop now occupies an 1888 general store, and a hat shop is housed in a candy store from the same year. The first mayor’s house dates from 1868 but has been relocated to the transit plaza.
The 1894 fire destroyed all the frame structures along the east side of Main Street, and the first commercial masonry buildings constructed shortly after the fire now house restaurants. There are some 30 eateries in all, which include a wide selection of upscale restaurants in this now-gentrified downtown. You’ll find good sushi, Italian, Thai, and fusion cuisine.
My favorite – and highly photogenic – old buildings are the two theaters. The Art Moderne-style Fox California Theater was built in 1921 and is still in use. The El Rey Theater, from 1935, is similar in style but is currently unoccupied. At the corner of Main and West Gabilan, just a block down from the Steinbeck Center, sits the J. H. McDougall Building. Built in 1898, this picture-postcard structure once housed the business interests of its namesake and now hosts a breakfast café. One block further south is the 1930 Salinas National Bank building, a six-story Art Deco landmark of nostalgia. Community Bank now owns it.
Just to the north of the Steinbeck Center is the Salinas Railroad Station. Built in 1942 by the Southern Pacific, it serves Amtrak’s Los Angeles-Seattle Coast Starlight and may one day see more frequent daily service to San Francisco, according to California state transportation planners. Adjacent to the station is the 1904 Railway Express Agency building, a reminder of pre-FedEx days. It is now being used by a local model railroad club.
By the time he was nineteen, Steinbeck had moved to New York and would only return occasionally to his childhood home in Salinas. In 1960, when he stopped there during his cross-country camper trip, his return was bittersweet. While fondly remembering his family, his youth and his land, something had changed. Leaving a bar after drinks with old friends, he wrote, “I was on Alvarado Street, slashed with neon light – and around me it was nothing but strangers.”
Were Steinbeck to arise from his cemetery plot in Salinas to walk the streets of Oldtown, he would surely recognize the essence of the town he once knew. He might even find it a little friendlier today.
I live here in Salinas and salute your comments on Salinas, its rocky relationship with Steinbeck, its architecture, and its eateries. I think you've hit the nail on the head on most everything you've said... with the exception of the quote from Steinbeck in 'Travels with Charley'. Alvarado Street is in Monterey, not Salinas. He had drinks over there and wandered around a bit on that trip. He went up to Fremont Peak the next day and looked over the Valley, Salinas sprawling below (compared to what it had been in his childhood... but nothing compared to what it is now, 47 years later, with 150,000 people). Glad you enjoyed your stay.
Posted by: twisselman | June 01, 2007 at 05:56 PM