1 · POSITION
A Yale football captain and Skull and Bones man, distant cousin of the telegraph Morse, hired at twenty-nine to manage the Pacific Improvement Company and liquidate the holdings the Southern Pacific heirs no longer wanted. He did about ninety per cent of that in five years. Then he formed his own company, Del Monte Properties, in 1919, and bought what was left — the Monterey coastline, the Rancho Laureles, the county water works and the ageing Hotel Del Monte — for $1.34 million, financed by the San Francisco banker Herbert Fleishhacker.
2 · ⚑ THE MECHANISM HE INVENTED, AND IT IS STILL RUNNING
He built golf courses with the views and rimmed them with residential lots. Sales of the lots paid for the courses; tolls on the private 17-Mile Drive — fifty cents for a car, twenty-five for a saddle horse — paid the maintenance. That is the private golf residential community, and every entry of that kind in this register descends from it. He described the intention as protecting the shoreline as one of the greatest private parks in existence, banned needless clearing and set aside greenbelts for wildlife.
3 · ⚑ AND THE PART THE CELEBRATORY ACCOUNTS LEAVE OUT
The control was total: not a tree in the Del Monte Forest could be removed without his personal approval. It extended to who could live there. The deeds barred Asians, Black Americans and descendants of the Turkish Empire from buying, leasing or occupying property in Pebble Beach. Those covenants were dropped as unenforceable in 1964, after the Civil Rights Act. The Library records this in the same paragraph as the conservation, because they were the same instrument: a private code governing a coast, written by one man, doing both things at once.
4 · READ AGAINST THE AGA KHAN
LHL-P-054 Prince Karim al-Hussaini bought a Sardinian coast in 1962, wrote a building code, built the hotels and the golf and governed the façades afterwards. Morse did the same thing forty-three years earlier on the opposite side of the world, and the register has held one of the pair and not the other since it began. The Private Residences register noticed the omission first.
5 · CANDOUR
⚑ The acreage is given as 7,000 in two accounts and 18,000 in two others; they may describe the coastal purchase and the whole peninsula holding respectively, and the entry carries both. The 1924 fire, the sale of the Hotel Del Monte to the Navy, and what became of the company after 1969 are not established here.