In 1946, Monterey's sardine fleet hauled 142,282 tons out of the bay. A year later the catch was 26,818 tons. Nobody could say where the fish went. The canneries started closing, and the workers who had packed the silver harvest into tins, Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Filipino, scattered into an economy that had no use for their hands. By the mid-1950s the sardine fishery north of Monterey Bay was finished.
What followed was a generation of rot. Fires gutted the abandoned factories through the 1960s and 1970s, some accidental, some convenient. The city renamed eight blocks of Ocean View Avenue "Cannery Row" in 1958, after Steinbeck's novel, which was a kind of embalming. You could walk the street and find crumbling brothels, fishermen's shanties, vacant cannery shells sliding toward the water. A restaurateur named Ted Balestreri opened The Sardine Factory in 1968 in a building where cannery workers had once eaten their meals. He saw potential. Most people saw a ghost town with a literary pedigree.
The sardines hadn't vanished solely because the boats took too many, though the boats took too many. A cold phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation had shifted ocean conditions against them. Overfishing deepened the trough. California imposed a moratorium on commercial sardine harvest in 1967 that lasted nearly two decades. The stock eventually rebuilt through the 1990s. Then it crashed again, 95 percent decline since 2006, and the commercial fishery closed in 2015. Same ocean cycle. Same overfishing in the downturn. Same story, different dates on the calendar.
The pivot happened one evening in 1976, at a home in Carmel Valley. Four marine biologists from Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, Steve Webster, Chuck Baxter, Nancy Burnett, and her husband Robin, were sitting around a question Nancy's father had put to his children: come up with a project the family could fund. They'd been thinking about the derelict Hovden Cannery, the last one on the Row, closed three years earlier. Stanford owned the property and was using it as a warehouse. All of them knew the building. They'd walked past it on the way to the marine station. They were thinking small.
"We were thinking of remodeling a little, and inviting people in to see some fishes and invertebrates."
Someone said the word "aquarium." Nobody remembers who.
Nancy's father was David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, whose fortune was among the largest in America. Robin Burnett wrote the proposal. The family commissioned SRI International to study feasibility. SRI predicted 345,000 visitors the first year. In April 1978 the Packards created the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation and bought the Hovden property from Stanford for nearly a million dollars.
They discovered the old cannery was held together by rust. Tore it down. Built a $55 million facility from scratch. It opened October 20, 1984. First-year attendance: 2.1 million. SRI had missed by a factor of six.
The aquarium was extraordinary by almost any measure. Julie Packard, Nancy's sister and herself a marine biologist, served as executive director for forty years, shaping it into a global force for ocean conservation. The exhibits built public awareness that helped catalyze the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 1992, 6,094 square miles of protected ocean, the largest in the continental United States. Water quality improved. The bay recovered from decades of sewage and fish-processing waste. Cannery Row draws four million visitors a year.
The stink is gone, though, and the grating noise, and the quality of light Steinbeck tried to capture. The cannery buildings have been repurposed into restaurants and boutiques so thoroughly that a recent visitor wrote of getting "almost no sense of what used to be." The Hovden Cannery had employed 4,000 workers at its peak. The multiracial workforce that pulled the nets and packed the tins and went on strike for better wages are not the primary beneficiaries of a tourism economy built on the memory of their labor.
The Packard fortune transformed a dead industrial street into a world-class institution that genuinely advanced marine science and ocean protection. That is not nothing. It may be the best outcome anyone could have engineered from a collapsed fishery and a rusting street. But the people who built Cannery Row, who cut fish and raised families in the smell of rendered sardine oil, they got a generation of unemployment and then a street lined with shops selling souvenirs of a life that was never coming back.