Sardines and Silicon: The Rise and Fall of Monterey's Fishing Industry and its Environmental Legacy

The path to the 1847 adobe's front door is paved with whale vertebrae — bones set into the ground as a casual reminder of what the building became. It started as a private residence, turned whaling headquarters in the 1850s, and the nearby beach did the processing. The bones stayed. A century later, more than 30 canneries were running along what was then called Ocean View Avenue, pulling sardines until production peaked in the early 1940s, collapsed after the war, and the last cannery closed in 1973. The street was renamed for Steinbeck in 1958. The Hovden Cannery site became the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Beneath all of it: a submarine canyon dropping 12,743 feet, deeper than the Grand Canyon, designated federal sanctuary in 1992 across 6,094 square miles. The canyon is the reason the bay is the bay — and the reason anything survived the industry at all.