A Brief History of John Steinbeck’s Old Ocean View Avenue

by Michael K. Hemp,

Cannery Row Historian and Author

Photo source unknown, please contact.

     
    The street made world-famous by John Steinbeck's 1945

fictional best seller, “Cannery Row,” was originally a wagon-rutted

coastal dirt road which led from Monterey to a Chinese settlement

at “China Point” [Pt. Alones], established in the early 1850’s. It

was this Chinese settlement, populated largely by entire fishing

families arriving directly from China by junk, that began the

fishing industry for which Monterey would become famous a century later.

    In the late 1800’s, Portuguese shore-whaling and salmon fishing

were conducted off the rocky shoreline and small beaches below

the road. The construction of the railroad to Monterey and to its

lavish Hotel Del Monte brought vacationers and fashionable

tourism to the former [and still sleepy] Spanish-Mexican capitol

of Alta, California. The railroad also brought immigration to the

Monterey Bay region. Among these immigrants were the

[Genovese] Italian fishermen who would pressure, challenge, and

eventually drive the Chinese from fishing primacy on the bay.

     At the turn of the century, salmon was the fishing industry's

mainstay; the bountiful Monterey sardine, however, was simply

too plentiful to ignore. So, the early salmon buyers at Monterey

became sardine canners--principally Frank Booth, who, in 1902,

built Monterey's first real cannery adjacent to the fisherman's

wharf in the harbor. Fishing technology at Monterey at the time

was archaic and inefficient; the canning process was equally

crude. The unsightliness, odor, and processing waste from Booth's

harbor cannery dictated that all future canneries would have to

locate out “Ocean View Avenue”--the coastal road toward China

Point.