John Steinbeck
Historic Cannery Row
The real neighborhood of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
Real people and places in the neighborhood of Monterey’s old Ocean View Avenue inspired fictional characters and establishments in the mind of John Steinbeck. Published in 1945, his novel Cannery Row vividly captured the essence of life during the cannery era of the 1930s and 1940s.
Steinbeck’s longtime friend, biologist Ed Ricketts, is immortalized in the character Doc in Cannery Row and its sequel Sweet Thursday. Doc’s Western Biological Laboratory was based on Ed Ricketts’s real lab, Pacific Biological Laboratories located today at 800 Cannery Row.
The Wing Chong Market at 835 Cannery Row was owned by Chinese entrepreneur Won Yee, whom Steinbeck cast as the grocer Lee Chong in the novel. The La Ida Cafe, located at 851 Cannery Row, was actually a brothel in the cannery days, as was the Bear Flag Restaurant, operated by Flora Woods, whom Steinbeck named Dora Flood. The site of the old Bear Flag is now Mackerel Jack’s Trading Company at 799 Cannery Row.
In 1958, long after the publication of Cannery Row, the city of Monterey renamed Ocean View Avenue after the famous novel, forever tying the street to the novel’s creator, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck.
Marker can be reached from the intersection of Monterey Recreational Trail and Bruce Aris Way (Irving Avenue), on the right when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
