Cannery Row

The street was called Ocean View Avenue until 1958, when Monterey renamed it after the novel John Steinbeck had published there in 1945. By then the sardine industry that built it was already gone — production peaked in the early 1940s with more than 30 canneries operating along the waterfront, collapsed after the war, and the last cannery closed in 1973. The Hovden Cannery site became the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Several of the original industrial buildings survive.