Monterey Bay Aquarium

The building was a sardine cannery. Then the sardines were gone—overfished into absence—and Cannery Row went quiet. When Monterey Bay Aquarium opened here in October 1984, it was the first public aquarium to exhibit a living kelp forest at scale, a thing professionals had said couldn't be done. It remains the only institution in the world to have successfully kept a great white shark on display for longer than 16 days. Its Seafood Watch program, launched in 1999, reshaped how Americans think about what they eat from the ocean.