Customer Reviews

CANNERY ROW, The History of John Steinbeck's Old Ocean View Avenue

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Page after page of black and white photographs vividly evoke the Cannery Row of days long gone, when the cannery whistles blew to call the workers down to the shoreline of Monterey Bay. You can almost smell the over-powering stink of fish oil and fish meal and fish guts, hear the clank of Southern Pacific freight trains lumbering over the points laden with cans of sardines and salmon for distant markets. Michael Hemp's lively commentary on the photographs adds background and history without overwhelming the casual reader with detail. The section on Ed Flanders Ricketts, the model Steinbeck used for Doc and many other characters in his fiction, is particularly interesting to those who know little about this revolutionary marine biologist. Good maps help visitors orient themselves to existing buildings like Kalisa's La Ida Cafe (still serving up hot coffee and bellydancers since 1958), the Wing Chong Market, and Ricketts' Lab.

I have recently begun a yearlong project to model a seaport harbor in 1/4-inch scale. This photo history of Cannery Row is the best source of images that I have found to show detail of pilings and sway bracing that fill the space beneath piers and wharves. While my interest is in the structures built over the water and the boats that served the canning industry, this pictorial history also documents the cannery interiors and the streetfront sides of the industries. In fact, with maps and aerial photos, this publication presents a comprehensive history of the Monterey waterfront and the people who worked there during the 1928-1946 heyday of the sardine harvest.

I found what I was looking for in this volume, without really studying the history lessons presented, nor the correlations with John Steinbeck's novel. There is much more in this volume for the student of American literature, or the casual visitor to Monterey, California.

Having grown up in Monterey, California and having known some of the "old" Cannery Row, I truly enjoyed pouring through this book. The writing is a bit stilted, and the editing is atrocious, but all-in-all it's a terrific record of the street now known as Cannery Row. I'd ask the author to do some serious line-editing in his next edition.