Cannery Row: The History of Old Ocean View Avenue

This is a well research history book on Cannery Row of Monterey in California on the development of a sleeping coast town into a major fishing and now tourist attraction. The black and white pictures describe the fishing glory days of canning industry in abalone and sardine cans for export with fish meals. The text almost jumped at readers in hearing the whistles from different factories to work the shift. Chinese were the pioneer in creating gold from ocean with the night torch in sampans to attract the curious squids into the net. They made gold in the gold opportunity in the gold mountain by fishery for Gold State of California. The Oakland Chinatown tycoon Lew Hing set up his factory in Cannery Row for export in WW I relief. Cannery Row still had Chinese shadow with the Ocean View Hotel, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Wu It is fun to read this interesting documentary on Cannery Row and visit Fishman’s Wharf to enjoy fried fish, squid and abalone seafood.

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.