After 127 Years, You Can Find Us at 376 Ocean Avenue
For 127 years, this bakery did not have a street number. Neither did anybody else in Carmel.
That is how the town has always worked. No addresses, no mail slots, no numbers on the doors. Directions here sound like a treasure map: Ocean, three southeast of Lincoln. It worked fine, mostly, for about a century.
Now Carmel is adding street numbers so fire engines can find buildings faster. Last week it was our turn. Papa and the crew climbed the ladder, and up went three brass digits on the rust fascia above our door: 376.
Here is the funny part. The bakery is older than the town. We opened on Ocean Avenue in 1899. Carmel did not incorporate until 1916. The development company that built up the village did not arrive until 1902. When the first houses went up around us, the ovens were already warm.
Fritz Schweninger built this building as a bakery and lived upstairs. Every morning he climbed down a ladder to start the bake. The ladder is still in the building. So is the char on the beams upstairs from the fire in 1923, which the redwood shrugged off.
“This building already survived one fire, in 1923,” Papa told The Carmel Pine Cone this week. “If a number on the door helps the engines find us faster, I’ll take it.”
Five families have owned Carmel Bakery. We are the fifth, and we almost were not. Papa asked to buy this bakery years ago and was told no. The owner, Hector De Smet, said the young woman at the counter would run it one day. So Papa bought Wishart’s Bakery down the street in 1986 and kept baking. Two years later, De Smet knocked on his door. The bakery has been ours since 1988.
The bakery that opened before Carmel was a town did not get number 1. We got 376, and we will take it. It even made the front page of this week’s Carmel Pine Cone, and Monterey County Now came by too. The full story is on our press page.
Nothing else changes. The mail still goes to the P.O. box. The pretzels still come out warm. The ovens still come on while you sleep. The only new thing is the number above the door.
Come see it. Then come in.
Carmel Bakery, 376 Ocean Avenue, Carmel-by-the-Sea. Est. 1899. We bake while you sleep.
