24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY august 10-16, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com all with formation of a city. We also feel we cannot afford the expense of a yearly fight nor the loss of a neighbor’s good will.” In the Aug. 25 election, 303 voters turned out—about 80 percent of the area’s registered voters—and proponents prevailed by a 169-134 margin. And like that, in 1953 with a 35-vote lead, Del Rey Oaks became the ninth city in Monterey County. • • • Before Seaside was incorporated in 1954, there were efforts to include what would later become Sand City within its boundaries—the coastal strip of land, after all, was the oldest neighborhood in the Seaside community—but those efforts were rebuffed by property owners, many of whom operated industrial businesses in the area. North of Olympia Avenue, Seaside’s western boundary would be the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, which run along Del Monte Boulevard. At the time, there were two sand mining operations on the beach, which utilized “draglines,” mechanical scrapers that dredged sand directly from the surf. After the newly formed Seaside’s general plan called for the beach to be designated for recreational use, the industrialists on the coastal strip of sand feared another annexation attempt. So they decided to get ahead of it, and submitted a notice of intent to the county on Sept. 18, 1959, to circulate a petition for incorporation, and to set the city’s boundaries at Fort Ord to the north and Seaside to the east and south. Among the proponents was Robert McDonald III, co-owner of Monterey Sand Co., which owned one of the sand mining operations on the beach. McDonald told the Herald in a Sept. 19 story: “The people here want to control their own destiny.” Other supporters of incorporation included Granite Construction Co.—which also operated a sand mine on the beach—and local excavating contractor Phil Calabrese, who would become the city’s first mayor, a role in which he served until he died in 1977 at age 59. In a Sept. 23 article in the Herald, Monterey resident Ben Tanner, a contractor whose business was located in what would become Sand City, said of incorporation, “Our interests are not those of the city of Seaside. We just don’t carry enough weight and county services are inadequate. We need road improvements now. It may not be a good thing, but it is better than anything else.” Resident A.J. “Ace” Williams, a retired Army sergeant, was quoted saying, “Seaside can’t stop us from incorporating. The majority here doesn’t want the form of slap-stick government Seaside has always represented.” Seaside Mayor Joe Cota, whose business Cota Transfer and Storage Co. was located in the proposed Sand City, was a leading opponent of incorporation, and in November 1959 argued that annexing to Seaside would result in a cheaper tax rate. McDonald, the sand mining industrialist, responded, telling the Herald, “The mayor’s arithmetic is mighty poor. But don’t be too harsh on him. Because he is criticizing us he is the greatest booster for incorporation that we have.” Cota was out of town and unavailable for comment, but about a week later, in a Nov. 11 story in the Herald, he “apologized for a mistake he made in addition,” and also said he was stepping down as the leading opponent of incorporation. A Nov. 13 story in the San Jose Mercury News reported that the biggest challenge for incorporation proponents was “not whether they can get a majority of 114 registered voters to go for incorporation but whether they can round up one-fourth of the property owners by Dec. 18 to petition for an election.” (If they could not meet that deadline, they would have to wait another two years before trying again.) The challenge, according to Milton Thompson, an attorney for sand mining interests backing incorporation, was that “some of the 1,200 property owners in the area are scattered all over the world.” The deadline was met, and the election was set for Tuesday, Nov. 18, 1960. The population of Sand City at the time was 681, with 112 registered voters. On Nov. 18, voters favoring incorporation prevailed, 45 to 25, and Sand City was officially born. How many of those voters actually lived in Sand City, however, is unclear: Calabrese, the city’s first mayor, by all appearances lived in Carmel Valley. After he died, his wife Muriel told the San Jose Mercury News in 1986 that she and her husband owned several houses on the Monterey Peninsula. “The biggest part of his time was spent here, in Sand City,” she said. “I lived in Carmel Valley. But there’s no law that says he couldn’t visit me there, is there?” • • • Sand City’s transition from a city of industry to its current identity of an artist-friendly community with a pro-development, industrial-chic vibe started in the late 1960s, concurrent with cultural shifts in California in that era. Rent was cheap at that time in Sand City and by 1969, it became a hippie enclave. And the so-called hippies wanted to change the leadership of the city, and spearheaded a recall of Calabrese that year, an effort that made national news. The crux of their campaign pitch was that the city’s industrialists were razing homes to make way for industrial warehouses, forcing out residents, hippies among them. In the run-up to the election, hippies from elsewhere took up residence in Sand City to boost the chances for a recall. Calabrese countered by bringing in mobile homes for his employees who did not live there, so they could vote. At one point, bulldozers from Calabrese’s construction company reportedly leveled a group of shacks that were home to 20 hippies. “There’s a small town near Monterey, California, called Sand City,” said Chet Huntley, an NBC news anchor, in a 1969 news clip. “It has a mayor who’s a millionaire contractor, but also has a hippie population which doesn’t like him, and recently the hippies put on a campaign to get the mayor out, but they lost.” The recall effort failed by a 2-1 margin. In 1970, Calabrese also saw to it that a planned concert with an expected 40,000 attendees—this was just three years after the legendary Monterey International Pop Festival—wouldn’t happen. Even though the city denied the event permit, the promoters said they were going to throw the concert anyway, so Calabrese reportedly got on a bulldozer and moved a mountain of sand to block the access point. The show was subsequently canceled. That same year, Calabrese’s company built a seawall on the shore of the beach with rip-rap—broken concrete— in an effort to build a coastal road, Vista Del Mar. He succeeded in building the road, but his seawall couldn’t save it—erosion from sand mining eventually undermined it, though evidence of the road is still visible today. That road, one could argue, was a metaphor—change was coming for “ If we form our own city we will have no problems with parking and shopping and no particular police problem.” Del Rey Oaks City Hall was dedicated on June 26, 1971, after the young city outgrew a building in Del Rey Park. The current city hall is a retrofitted former Seaside Fire District station, and just inside the walls contain pieces of the city’s history.
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