Cannery Row Monterey, CA: Sardines, Industry, and Steinbeck

Cannery Row Monterey, CA is a historic waterfront street that was once the industrial heart of the city's sardine-canning industry. Its distinctive character comes from the meeting of surviving early industrial structures, waterfront views, and the literary world John Steinbeck built from Monterey's workers, fishermen, drifters, and business owners. The street was even officially renamed after Steinbeck's novel.

What is Cannery Row in Monterey, CA?

Cannery Row is a historic waterfront street in Monterey, California, once home to a thriving sardine-canning industry. The area retains many of its early industrial structures and is recognized as a significant cultural and historic landmark in Monterey. Those remaining buildings and the coast beside them distinguish Cannery Row from a generic commercial street: they preserve a visible connection to the working waterfront that shaped the district.

How did Cannery Row get its name?

Cannery Row was originally called Ocean View Avenue. It was nicknamed “Cannery Row” as early as 1918 and officially received that name in 1958.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the waterfront included canneries, warehouses, fishing boats, and processing plants. At the height of the fishing seasons, the canneries operated around the clock, making the district's industrial identity impossible to separate from sardine processing and the people who worked around it.

John Steinbeck lived nearby and drew on the district's workers, fishermen, drifters, and business owners in his fiction. Cannery Row was published in 1945, followed by Sweet Thursday in 1954. Steinbeck's writing connected the street's real people and places with a fictional community, and the success of Cannery Row helped turn the working industrial neighborhood into a widely recognized literary setting.

What can you notice along Cannery Row today?

Look for the surviving early industrial structures and consider what they reveal about the former canning district. The buildings retain evidence of Cannery Row's industrial past, while the waterfront views show the continuing relationship between the street and the coast.

The contrast between those remaining structures and the present-day street helps you imagine a waterfront lined with canneries, warehouses, fishing boats, and processing plants. It also offers a glimpse of the Monterey environment that inspired Steinbeck's characters and his vision of community, friendship, and life along the California coast. This is not just a literary name attached to a street: Cannery Row links physical remnants of the sardine industry with the real-world setting behind Steinbeck's Monterey fiction.

Cannery Row is stop 3 of 8 on Steinbeck's Monterey: The Real World Behind the Novels. To explore the street in that literary context, take the Steinbeck's Monterey tour and follow its route through the places connected to the novels.