A photographic history of Monterey is on display at the city’s historic Colton Hall Museum through the end of September.
The photographs are under the stewardship of James Perry, curator and executive director of the Monterey County Historical Society.
Perry says the location is fitting. The history museum includes the room where California’s constitution was debated, developed and signed.
“[There are] well over 100 images resident in this exhibition [that] document and celebrate the history, the development of industry and commerce, and everyday life of Monterey,” he said.
The exhibit features more than 100 photographs from the collection of Pat Hathaway, who died three years ago. It contains a photo, taken in 1888, of men working on a sewer system on Alvarado, downtown Monterey’s main street. In the photo, it’s a dirt road with wooden western false front buildings and shows the roughness of the area at that time.
There are photographs of Cannery Row when it still had canneries and of the Del Monte Hotel when it still had guests. The hotel was one of the first resorts west of the Mississippi and helped establish Monterey as a tourist destination.
Hathaway and his longtime friend Dixie Layne met in junior high school. She said his interest in photography began with a Brownie box camera when he was 12. His collection of over 80,000 photographs began with a classified ad in the Monterey Herald.
The wife of photographer Lewis Jocelyn was trying to clear out items belonging to her late husband. There were cameras, photographic equipment and lots of photos from the 1800s to 1920.
It was all free, but Layne says it came with a catch. Hathaway was told, “Come and get it, but you have to take everything.”
So he did.
Later, the Herald published an article on Hathaway’s collection and soon he was getting calls from other families whose father or grandfather had passed away and had old photos. Hathaway even began going through the phonebook and calling well known photographers in the area and asking if they had historic photos.
The collection now resides at the Historical Society’s Boronda Adobe in Salinas. It is not open for public viewing but the Society is digitizing the photos and they eventually will be available to view online.
The exhibit, “Pat Hathaway Memorial Exhibition: Celebrating His Images of Monterey,” is free and runs through September 29. It is made possible by a grant from the Doud Fund, administered by the Community Foundation of Monterey County.
