The traveler passing through Watsonville sees only a rather busy main street, plaza and business section, but only a little way to one side is an area where quick-freezing plants, ice plants, warehouses and lettuce-chilling works cover block after block, with switch engines busily shifting empty cars to be loaded and loaded cars to be made into trains and headed east.
Some eight miles south of Watsonville is Moss Landing, a port for vessels of moderate draft, from which the grain crops of the region once were shipped. Now it is the home of a picturesque fishing fleet and the scene of one of the largest steam-electric plants in the West. This giant, which the public may visit by obtaining a permit, produces 771,000 horsepower. Its eight boilers are each as high as a ten-story building and, the better to withstand any possible earthquake, are suspended in steel towers more massive than many bridge piers. Operators in the control room use television to watch the leaping flames inside the boilers and to supervise change-overs from natural gas to fuel oil when required. Steam pressure is an incredible—except to engineers—1,405 pounds per square inch in one section of the plant and 1,510 pounds in another.
Scenes and Structures on Unique “Path of History” in Monterey Bring Memories of the Days When California Was Young
The first building in California in which a stage performance was given for an admission fee. Pacific and Scott Sts., Monterey.
The Casa Amesti, on Monterey’s Path of History. Built early in Mexican era by Jose Amesti as a wedding gift to his daughter.
The old Customs House at Monterey. Here Commodore John Drake Sloat, on July 7, 1846, raised the American flag and claimed for the United States the entire West, all of which was then known under the name of California.
Between here and Monterey you may drive for miles between fields laid out in neat rows of thistly artichoke plants. Castroville calls itself “The Artichoke Center of the World,” and with reason, for the annual production from this area is more than 1,300,000 boxes.