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Novel Tourism: Nature, Industry, and Literature on Monterey's Cannery Row
CONNIE Y. CHIANG
This article examines the evolution of tourism on Monterey's Cannery Row from the 1950s to the early 1970s. To revitalize this former sardine processing center, city officials, developers, and planners utilized the beauty of the coastline, the deteriorating built environment of the industrial era, and John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
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JOHN STEINBECK'S 1954 NOVEL, Sweet Thursday, the sequel to Cannery Row, opens with a dismal account of the sardine industry's precipitous postwar decline in Monterey, California: "When the war came to Monterey and to Cannery Row everybody fought it more or less, in one way or another.... The canneries themselves fought the war by getting the limit taken off fish and catching them all. It was done for patriotic reasons, but that didn't bring the fish back. As with the oysters in Alice, 'They'd eaten every one.'"1 Once a thriving street lined with over twenty sardine processing plants, Cannery Row was no longer a place swirling with activity. As Monterey resident Ed Larsh recalled, "In 1949, most of the sardines had been netted, and the entire industry was gasping like a fish out of water."2 The future of Cannery Row appeared altogether bleak. |
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When it became clear that the fishery was not going to rebound quickly, Monterey city planners and developers turned their attention back to tourism. Monterey had attracted tourists since the late-nineteenth century, when well-heeled visitors flocked to the Hotel Del Monte, one of the grand railroad hotels of the American West. Tourism never disappeared from the city's shores in subsequent years, but it did become less important during the sardine's heyday. The return to tourism, therefore, was not an entirely new development for Monterey, nor was it unusual for a western community on the tail end of a boom-and-bust economy. Many other places once dependent on extractive industries also directed their energies to tourism when natural resources became scarce or investors moved elsewhere.3 |
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Monterey's postwar tourism program both paralleled and diverged from those of other towns whose past fortunes had evaporated. Tourism boosters throughout the region emphasized the natural beauty and recreational opportunities of their locales. They often celebrated their industrial heritage by restoring old buildings and opening historical museums. And Monterey followed many of these patterns. The same spaces where purse seine boats had unloaded sardines became splendid ocean vistas. Owners renovated canneries and warehouses, creating restaurants, t-shirt shops, and art galleries.4 But Monterey's connection to John Steinbeck's novels, especially Cannery Row, also made its promotional efforts distinct. City planners and developers tried to preserve and recreate Cannery Row's industrial ambiance, in large part, as a way to generate nostalgia for his fiction.5 Few western tourist attractions have had a literary figure of Steinbeck's stature so closely tied to its history and its environs. |
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