Morro Bay by Threes

This would be a beautiful place if it weren’t for those ugly towers. What eyesores!”

That offhand comment, broadcast from a nearby table at Dorn’s Café in the central California coast town of Morro Bay, set in motion the following photo essay. It got me thinking about and questioning the ways iconic visual landmarks interact to anchor our judgments about natural landscapes and built environments in California, especially along the precious coastline—in this case, the dramatic juxtaposition of Morro Rock, a volcanic plug that is home to the venerable and protected peregrine falcon, and the three concrete towers of a nearby power plant built in the early 1950s, the objects of scorn that morning in Dorn’s. From the windows of the café overlooking the embarcadero, the sightlines are especially dramatic and full of tension. With barely a quarter turn of the head, you can follow a dog-leg causeway from the monolithic Rock, looming 581 feet over the Morro Bay estuary like a giant asteroid stuck in the sand, to the three 45-story cylindrical sentinels that exhaust the power plant’s steam generators. Erect and irrepressible, both are inescapable sights from just about everywhere in town. You can pick them out easily along a 30-mile corridor of rugged coastline from Point Sal to the south, all the way to the abalone farm north of Cayucos.

These two incongruous landmarks also form the poles of a political flashpoint familiar to many towns and cities along California’s coastline. For at least 40 years, environmental groups opposed to coastal development, and developers eager to feed Californians’ appetite for coastal living have drafted these powerful visual symbols in support of their causes. Several years ago, the chamber of commerce produced a brochure that proudly displayed the smokestacks of its major sponsor, Pacific Gas & Electric. As pro-growth sentiment waned, the brochure designers pasted an inset photograph of a seagull over the plant’s smokestacks.

“Morro Bay by Threes” probes the hardening of visual categories in the turbid debate over the future of the California coastline as it plays out locally in a conversation between, literally, a rock and a hard place. Each photograph realigns or repositions one pole of a familiar civic landscape—the eyesores under scrutiny at Dorn’s—and in so doing, tries to redirect, even subvert, some of their authority and narrative power as icons of unsightliness and developmental rapacity. The photographs are invitations to view fixed positions from new vantage points. I am not fond of the smokestacks. I won’t rue their eventual demolition. Nor am I trying to take a position or stake an ideological claim. Having lived many years under the gaze of rock and tower, I find the sightlines here are personal, perhaps to the point of eccentric. They reveal angles and vantage points of an eye that has looked long and hard and, hopefully, beyond familiar conventions and ways of seeing. They uncover a certain symmetry, ambiguity, complexity, and dignity from the injury of a landscape’s ailing and contested parts.

Three slip pilings in front of Anchor Memorial Park on the Embarcadero. Built in 1953, the Morro Bay power plant stands on a 140-acre former U.S. Navy base. The plant consists of four steam turbine generators, a boiler furnace, a seawater intake unit, a switching station, and three 450-foot-tall stacks. For practical and aesthetic reasons, the turbine-generator building is clad in fluted aluminum siding. At a dedication ceremony on July 8, 1955, one speaker proudly declared the plant “as modern as tomorrow.”

© 2012 RALPH MENENDEZ

Three umbrellas on the patio of Dorn’s Breakers Café at the foot of Morro Bay Blvd. Most of the electricity generated at the plant, over 600,000 kilowatts in its heyday, was transmitted to the San Joaquin Valley to meet the growing needs of commercial agriculture, industry, and the post–World War II population bloom in Fresno and Bakersfield. A small fraction of the power was...