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.

   Sicilians and their “lampara” net fishing techniques, coupled

with the inventive genius of a Norwegian immigrant with

fishing industry experience, Knut Hovden, began a decade of

improvement in the technology of both fishing and canning

that positioned Monterey's burgeoning sardine industry for rapid

and enormous expansion due to food and ration demands created

by World War I. A major recession after recovered gradually into

the “Roaring Twenties” and the stench of sardine processing--

especially the grinding and baking of even edible sardines into

fishmeal--became the controversial smell of prosperity.

     Monterey's fishing and canning industries limped through the

Great Depression. Food, at least in the sardine business, was not in

critical supply. But the deprivations and hardships of the 1930’s

set the stage on a street lined with sardine factories for one of the

best read stories ever to emerge from American literature: John

Steinbeck's “Cannery Row.” In the intellectual company of

pioneering marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts and his friends on

old Ocean View Avenue in the early 1930’s, John Steinbeck lived

first-hand the scenes and locations of his charming (if only slightly

fictional) accounts of life and times on Cannery Row by one of the

most colorful cast of characters in American literature.

     The canning boom driven by World War II saw Monterey

become “The Sardine Capitol of the World,” processing nearly a

quarter million tons of sardines a season in its peak wartime

years--to less than 1,000 tons per season in the mid 1950’s. The

sardines had disappeared! Economic devastation settled in on

Monterey's fishing and canning industries, ending it forever as

Monterey’s major economic engine. Years of decline,

disintegration, fire, and collapse set in on a street that had no

other immediate usefulness to a fish canning industry without

fish.
     But the curious came, to see “Cannery Row” and experience its

funky, ghostlike revival as a tourist attraction--due largely to the

magic of the fame Steinbeck's fiction bestowed upon it. Today,

Cannery Row enjoys a commercial, historical, and literary

renaissance as the major tourism destination in Monterey. An

eclectic array of fine restaurants, hotels, activities, and shopping

of every kind abound to serve the millions of visitors to Cannery

Row each year on the once dusty coastal road. The street was

officially renamed Cannery Row in 1958, in honor of its Steinbeck

fame--a street who's future is inseparable from its literary and

historical heritage.

Thank you Michael. Thank you John.    - A.W.

Photo source unknown, please contact.