24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY june 29-july 5, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com Back when the city had a larger museums staff, musical concerts brought people to the hall. Those concerts have not returned since the end of Covid-19 restrictions. It’s a conundrum: The city wants people to come back, but there’s not enough staff to plan and oversee events that would possibly bring them back. “The museums took a big hit during Covid and multiple positions have not recovered since then. So it’s about, how do we continue to provide services here for the museums with a reduced staff?” Edwards says. They lost a fulltime museum and cultural arts manager, split with the library, when former manager Dennis Copeland retired. The position of part-time cultural arts assistant, who organized events, was eliminated at the start of the pandemic. “That’s been something we’ve been working with since I’ve been brought on,” Edwards adds. On an overcast spring day on Cannery Row, tourists in sweatshirts are walking up and down the sidewalk in front of an old, square, weathered wood building sandwiched between the InterContinental Hotel The Clement and a T-shirt shop, just down the block from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. No one seems to take notice of the building or be aware of its significance to scientific, literary and music history. This is the site of Pacific Biological Laboratories, also known as Doc’s Lab, founded by renowned marine biologist and ecologist Ed Ricketts. He may be better known as a friend to John Steinbeck—the author modeled the character of Doc in his novel Cannery Row after Ricketts. Following Ricketts’ untimely death at age 50 in 1948, it became the site of a men’s club, a social club where men gathered to swap stories, drink, listen to music and—famously—dream up the legendary idea that became the Monterey Jazz Festival. “The men’s club had this building longer than Ricketts did,” Edwards says. “There are multiple stories to be told here.” Inside it looks like members of the men’s club will show up at any moment to flip on the record player, pour themselves a drink from one of their private bottles displayed behind the bar and pull up a chair for an informal bull session. Little has changed since the city took over the property in 1993. It is open for free tours, by reservation, on the second Saturday of each month and for the occasional private tour at $52.50 for groups of up to 15 people. There are discussions about how to make it accessible, since entering the building requires climbing up stairs both in front and in the back. There is a small garage door facing Cannery Row and there are thoughts of putting a lift on the back of the building— something that was already done at Colton Hall. After descending the back stairs outside to the lower level of the Lab, Edwards unlocks the door to the laboratory itself, a space that looks like someone’s basement workshop. It smells like a mixture of the sea, mildew and dust, with a faint aroma similar to that of a wine cellar. Later, Edwards mentions that he recently learned that the men’s club members would buy wine casks and bottle and label their own wine in the downstairs lab. The basement also holds a small boat, a replica of a skiff known as the Baby Flyer. The original row boat was used by Ricketts and Steinbeck to reach the shore to collect samples while on their voyage upon the Western Flyer, made famous in Steinbeck’s book The Log from the Sea of Cortez. This replica is made with planks from the original Western Flyer, Edwards says. (The Western Flyer is currently being restored by a private nonprofit, the Western Flyer Foundation.) Also in the basement is a safe. Inside it, city staff found documents belonging to Steinbeck. The basement area is underutilized, Edwards says, leaving him and his staff wondering how best to display items in a meaningful way. Overall, he says the building could use more interpretation for the thousands of visitors who stroll past the front of the lab—some sort of signage that would share at least some of the history and information about tours. It’s a missed opportunity, says Edwards, especially for those visitors who come to Monterey for Monterey Bay, the Aquarium, Steinbeck or the city’s rich history. “If we can get [the lab] to be more visible to the public so they interpret it and know what it is and why there is such importance of that space to our history, it is really going to have a lot of value,” Edwards says. Across town near the southern end of Alvarado Street the sun is now shining. Inside an old Bank of America building that houses a Rasta, reggae and roots store, emblazoned with photos of Bob Marley and a red, yellow and green color palette, there still exists the bank’s old vault. This is where the city stores its most precious historical artifacts and artwork, seldom available for public view. Edwards leads visitors through a sliding glass door, and back to the 600-square-foot vault, complete with a steel door and classic spoked-wheel handle. They’re able to control the humidity, which helps protect the artifacts. The room is lined with shelves, boxes and objects too large or oddshaped to fit into a box. Along one wall, dozens of paintings are stacked side by side. There are items that are just plain odd, like the morbid-looking mold for Ed Ricketts’ bust tied up with rope and propped up in a dark corner of the vault. Lying on top of a file cabinet are small boxes, one labeled, “City of Monterey, Father Serra’s Hand.” Another is labeled, “Father Serra’s thumb,” and contains casts. It’s as if people or organizations who have items they don’t know what to do with pass them on to the city, which dutifully saves them for some unknown future purpose. Down the middle of the room is another row of shelves, stacked high with archival boxes containing more artifacts and an estimated 15,000 old photographs and documents that Edwards hopes to digitize and upload to the internet so the public has more access to them. “This is like a mini-version of Indiana Jones,” Edwards observes, referencing the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are so many items, down to small coins and bits of cloth, it would be hard to quantify everything in the collection. Monterey’s artifacts specialist, Jordan Leininger, who joins Edwards in the vault for the visit, dons white gloves to bring out Ricketts’ typewriter for inspection. They also have Ricketts’ record collection, donated by his daughter and already digitized for posterity. Another Ricketts possession is a box filled with extra blank catalog Top: Brian Edwards shows a replica of the skiff, Baby Flyer, in part made of planks from the actual Western Flyer, the fishing boat Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck used for their voyage to Baja California. They used the original Baby Flyer to row to shore and collect specimens. It now sits in the basement of the Pacific Biological Laboratory. Below: Ricketts’ lab building on Cannery Row.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==