Cannery Row

Cannery Row is a historic waterfront street in New Monterey, Monterey, California once home to a thriving sardine canning industry. Originally named Ocean View Avenue, it was nicknamed "Cannery Row" as early as 1918 and officially renamed in 1958. The area was immortalized in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954). The area retains many of its early industrial structures and is listed as a significant cultural and historic landmark in Monterey. Monterey’s canning industry began in 1902 and expanded rapidly during World War I, when high demand for canned fish led to the construction of numerous canneries along the shoreline. At its peak in the early 1940s, more than 30 canneries and reduction plants lined Ocean View Avenue. After the sardine population collapsed in the postwar years, the canneries closed one by one, with the last shutting down in 1973. In the following decades the former industrial buildings were adapted into shops, restaurants, and attractions, including the transformation of the Hovden Cannery site into the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which opened in 1984.