CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif. -- Merchants are heartily discouraged from selling ice cream cones in this well-ordered paradise, and no one, for aesthetic reasons, is allowed to string Christmas lights before December 8.
Playing Frisbee in the parks is illegal, and Carmel-by-the-Sea still has an anti-hippie ordinance on the books -- although unenforced - making it a crime to sit on the grass.
No live music, not even a solo guitarist at Bud's Pub, is permitted anywhere within the cypress-swept one square mile. Monterey, four miles north, is the closest spot for such entertainment.
In Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the average age is 51 and less than 10 percent of the villagers are under 18, people just go home at night. Nearly 52 percent of the seaside colonists are retired, living in homes - 80 percent of them more than 25 years old -- with an average value of $175,000.
'Home of the newly wed or nearly dead,' is Carmel's self-deprecating joke.
While many cities throughout the nation grapple with limits and controls on growth, Carmel simply bans it.
There are no supermarkets in Carmel. No sporting good stores, no McDonald's, no schools, no take-outeries, no nonsense.
Even the town's premier celebrity, Clint Eastwood, fought city hall for more than two years to get a building plan approved.
Residents still talk about erecting a toll gate where non-Carmelites would pay a fee to enter the town. Vacationers already pay $5 for the 17-Mile Drive past the baronial mansions and famed golf courses of adjacent Pebble Beach.
Five years ago one irate city official, fed up with out-of-towners, jumped aboard a tour bus and ordered the shocked tourists to vamoose. In 1982, several spirited townsfolk convinced the state to remove the 'Carmel, Turn Right' sign from Highway 1. It took nearly a year to get it back up again.
This dogged insistence on choking growth is in the name of preserving the Carmel that was home to the literary likes of Jack London, Lincoln Steffens and Robinson Jeffers. Critics, however, say the town is choking the life out of itself.
Residents cling fiercely to their traditions: No electric signs anywhere, no house numbers, no mail delivery, no tree cutting without permits. There are no sidewalks or curbs in residential areas.
In fact, it is against the law for women to wear high heels inside the city limits. Fearing suits from women who might injure themselves sans sidewalks, Carmel passed an anti-high heel law nearly 20 years ago requiring women to get a permit to wear such shoes. Many women in town have gotten the permit and had it framed.
In the 1970s, there were 10 gas stations in Carmel. Today, there are three, mone of which sell the necessary leaded supreme required for older model sports cars that many residents drive.
Parking places, already at a premium, are being replaced with small garden plots, and newspaper vendors are being ordered to remove their racks from the streets and place the papers in wooden containers the city has built.
There were 1,000 hotel units in 1958. There are 1,000 units today and no plans to build any more.
Last year, the lease on a Swenson's ice cream store and the Orange Julius outlet, which catered to tourists for 15 years, was not renewed. The space was subleased for a shoe store.
As former mayor Gunnar Norberg explained, 'There are bird sanctuaries and wildlife sanctuaries. This should be a sanctuary for homo sapiens. Capitalism needs to be suspended here.'
In many ways, the suspension occurred in 1929. That year, the city drafted an ordinance that in effect became the town's Magna Carta. It said Carmel is a residential city 'wherein business and commerce have in the past, are now, and are proposed to be in the future, subordinated to its residential character...'
Differing interpretations of this preamble have made for some fine civic tempests.
'They want it to be like it was in the 20s,' Eastwood recently complained. 'Well, it can't be. Of course we need to control growth, but some of the things they've done are silly.'
'We're preserving something here that's been lost in other cities,' countered city councilman Dave Maradai, Carmel's postmaster. 'We see ourselves as one of the finest small cities in the United States.'
Nonetheless, something restless has been stirring in the town of 4,800 residents, 60 restaurants, 70 art galleries, 100 boutiques and 30 real estate offices -- most of them selling property outside Carmel's borders.
Last summer's ban on sale of ice cream cones to go earned the headline 'Scrooge City?' in the Los Angeles Times and underscored the tensions that divide this land of native pines and sheltering oaks.
The financial balance of power has swung back and forth between business and residents for years. But not since the 1950s, an era of new motels and glittery gift shops, have business interests reigned supreme.
Residents still resent the business community for altering the character of their town and then leaving at sundown for neighboring Pebble Beach, Pacific Grove and Monterey.
'I tell people here if they want to make millions, make it somewhere else,' Norbergsaid.
A recent survey showed a whopping 79 percent of residents want T-shirt emporiums, shops and tourist-oriented restaurants zoned out of existence.
There is only one hardware store in Carmel, and a single barbershop left.
'The local people feel like they've been driven out of their own town,' by the tens of thousands of summer tourists, said Mayor Charlotte Townsend, a lifelong resident who lives in her childhood home.
'It's like being a salmon going upstream trying to drive up Ocean Avenue,' she said.
Business owners, meanwhile, say that the taxes they pay support Carmel, but the town returns only contempt in the form of bureaucratic roadblocks. To get a business license in Carmel, for instance, one must go before a special city board and explain precisely what will be sold.
Taxes on the city's 900 business outlets and the 10 percent hotel tax account for more than half of the Carmel's $6 million operating budget, resulting in a property tax of just $1 per $100 of assessed value -- the lowest rate of any of the 12 cities comprising Monterey County.
Some business people also accuse Carmel of snobbery concerning 'discount' operations. 'It's a place to go to buy a $1,000 necklace that you could buy for $300 anywhere else,' said Ted Bivins, a Pacific Grove engineer.
'They have no compassion,' said Paul Laub, owner of Laub's Country Store. 'They're against any change. I mean, they have only two public toilets in the whole city. They just don't care about tourists.
'Tourists don't want to have to go to a French restaurant and order the Chateaubriand for junior. Come on.'
When it comes to food, the most often-asked question from tourists is, according to locals, 'Excuse me, but you could tell me where the Hog's Breath Inn is?'
That's where Clint Eastwood enters.
Eastwood, a Carmel resident for more than 20 years, is part owner of the Hog's Breath. It is, despite its name, a romantic place for vacationing lovers with its courtyard, flowers and open fire.
Inside, the cozy ambience seems at odds with the billboard-sized painting of Eastwood squinting down the barrel of a rifle. A Dirty Harry Burger, ground chuck and sauteed mushrooms, goes for $9.95, and for a fistful of dollars one can purchase the 16-ounce New York steak.
For more than two years, Eastwood tried to build a two-story shop and office building on a lot he owns next to the Hog's Breath. Concrete pillars were to rise from the sidewalk with be large glass areas in between.
Although the design eventually passed muster with the planning commission, some council members balked. They felt the glassy, modern architectual mode clashed with Carmel's bucolic adobe, redwood shingles, Spanish-tiled roofs and storybook cottages. So Eastwood's architect returned to the drawing boards and came up with a new design, reducing the building's height by 18 inches.
When the council again vetoed the 55-year-old actor's plan, an irritated Eastwood sued the city. Then, stepping out of the low profile role he has always held in Carmel, Eastwood spoke before the Carmel Business Association and essentially told the council, 'Make my day.'
'I said, 'these people don't know what they want,'' Eastwood said. 'They don't want to sit down with you. They don't want to cooperate. None of these people have ever met a payroll. It's hard to get anything done.'
In late November, city officials and Eastwood finally sat down. Eastwood agreed to make most of their design changes and the suit was called off.
'I think they wanted to get this thing over, knowing an election was coming up (next April),' Eastwood said.
'He likes to shoot from the hip,' Townsend retorted. 'He's never even met me, and I don't think he has ever been to a council meeting.'
'I can't run a popularity contest with these people,' Eastwood countered. 'I guess I'm just getting cynical in my old age.'
The Eastwood affair is part and parcel of Carmel's distaste for outsiders.
'If all the tourists went away, we'd be fine,' said Brian Roseth, an assistant city planner.
Townsend concedes tax revenue would drop, but says the city would not have to pay nearly $1 million to finance a 30-member police force if the tourists went away. Expenses for beach protection, traffic control and clean-up would also be drastically reduced.
In any case, the once-robust artists colony appears to be making a slow change into a somewhat lifeless retirement village.
'We are a town that lives on its reputation,' said Jonathan Resier, a 15-year resident. 'We're really just a very quiet place.'
There have been demographic shifts that indicate some, although not much, new blood is arriving. Most of the newcomers are 25 to 35 years old -- professional couples who can afford to live in Carmel.
Violent crime is virtually non-existent. The last homicide occured in 1980 when a Salinas man was found beaten to death on the beach, according to police.
'So here were are,' said postmaster Maradei, looking around Picadelli Park. 'We're sitting in a garden. There's birds, the ocean, trees. We got what a lot of people would love to have. Problems? Not that many.'
Maradei waved goodbye, and said with a chuckle, 'Remember, no Frisbee in the park.'
