Cannery Row’s last little homes: the shacks that remembered Monterey’s sardine boom

Today, Monterey’s Cannery Row is one of California’s best-known waterfront districts, lined with restaurants, shops, hotels and the celebrated Monterey Bay Aquarium.
And It is difficult to imagine that, for much of the twentieth century, this same stretch of Ocean View Avenue was a noisy, crowded industrial landscape dominated by the smell of fish, the clang of machinery and thousands of workers processing sardines around the clock.

From the early 1900s until the industry’s collapse in the postwar years, Monterey was, quite literally, a city built around the sardine. More than 30 canneries and marine docks eventually crowded the waterfront, and at the height of the industry as many as 4,000 people worked in the canneries. In short, Monterey proudly became known as the “Sardine Capital of the World,” and the enormous quantities of fish arriving from Monterey Bay were transformed into cans that travelled far beyond California.
But an industry of that size needed workers—and workers needed somewhere to live.
Cannery owners responded by building hundreds of tiny wooden houses along the waterfront.
They were not homes in the conventional sense: most were single-room shacks, hastily constructed from wooden planks, with board-and-batten siding and simple shingle roofs. Inside, there was just enough for the essentials: a small kitchen area, running water, electricity, natural gas, a table and iron bedsteads.
They were modest accommodations for people earning very modest wages.
Cannery workers could make as little as 35 cents an hour, while housing in Monterey was scarce and expensive.
As a result, a shack designed for one family could end up accommodating several people, and four occupants in a single unit was not unusual.

The neighborhood reflected the extraordinary diversity of Monterey’s cannery workforce. Filipino, Japanese and Spanish-speaking workers were among the communities that played important roles in the sardine industry, alongside many other immigrants and migrants who came to the coast looking for work. The shacks were therefore more than cheap housing: they were part of a multicultural working community created by the rise of the fishing industry.
The area where many of them stood acquired a wonderfully peculiar nickname: the “Chicken Walk.”
Wooden planks embedded in the slope served as steps leading up to the little houses, and observers thought the workers climbing them looked like chickens making their way into a coop.

Although the original settlement has disappeared almost completely, Monterey chose not to let the memory vanish with it. Three of the workers’ shacks were preserved and moved to Bruce Ariss Way, where they now stand across from the former Pacific Biological Laboratory of marine biologist Ed Ricketts.
That location is particularly fitting.
Ed Ricketts was a real-life figure who became one of the most important characters in John Steinbeck’s world. Steinbeck, who lived nearby and spent considerable time with Ricketts, immortalized him as “Doc” in Cannery Row and other works. When Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row appeared in 1945, the district itself became literary legend: a place populated by cannery workers, fishermen, drifters, dreamers and eccentric characters living on the margins of an industrial town.

The novel captured something that statistics never could—the strange, rough, colorful human world that existed between the canneries and the Pacific.
And the sardines were everywhere, of course.
The industry depended on enormous seasonal runs of sardines, meaning that employment was often seasonal too. When the Monterey canning season ended, many workers left town in search of other jobs. Some travelled to California’s agricultural valleys to pick fruit and vegetables; others headed north to work in Alaska’s salmon canneries, and life along Cannery Row was therefore shaped by the rhythms of the sea, agriculture and migration.

Eventually, however, the sardines began to disappear.

After World War II, the Monterey sardine industry went into a dramatic decline. Years of intense fishing were followed by environmental changes that affected sardine populations and their life cycle.
Cannery after cannery closed, and the waterfront that had once operated at full industrial speed grew increasingly quiet.

There is a famous story that captures the absurdity of the situation perfectly. When Ed Ricketts was supposedly asked where all the sardines had gone, his answer was brutally simple: “They’re in cans.”
Whether repeated as a joke or preserved as local lore, the line became a perfect epitaph for an industry that had effectively consumed its own future.

One of the last great reminders of that era was the Hovden Cannery, which finally closed in 1973.
Yet even that building found a second life.
The former cannery was transformed into the Monterey Bay Aquarium, today one of the world’s most celebrated marine institutions. Ironically, a place once devoted to removing fish from the ocean ultimately became a place dedicated to helping people understand and protect the ocean.
And the contrast could hardly be more appropriate.

And then there are the three little shacks.
They are easy to overlook beside the larger attractions of Cannery Row, but that is precisely what makes them interesting. They are not grand monuments or spectacular pieces of architecture, but tiny, functional wooden buildings that survived while an entire way of life disappeared around them.
Each preserved shack represents one of the major ethnic communities that worked in the canneries, with furnishings reflecting Filipino, Japanese and Spanish-speaking residents. Together, they offer an unusually intimate glimpse into everyday life during Monterey’s industrial heyday: how people cooked, slept, worked and shared impossibly small spaces while the Pacific supplied the raw material for a booming global industry.
The shacks also tell a story that Steinbeck understood particularly well. Cannery Row was never simply about sardines. It was about people who arrived because the sea offered work, built temporary lives around the factories, and eventually moved on when the fish—and the jobs—disappeared.

Today, visitors come to Cannery Row for the ocean views, the aquarium, Steinbeck’s literary legacy and the lively waterfront.
But tucked into that modern landscape are three small wooden reminders of a very different Monterey.
They are the last little homes of the sardine era—a world of canneries, seasonal workers, wooden walkways and crowded rooms that has almost entirely vanished.
The factories are gone.
The fish canneries have become museums, shops and aquariums.
The waterfront has been transformed.
But the shacks remain, quietly holding on to the memory of the people who once called Cannery Row home.