Context
The Monterey Peninsula, a granite batholith, marks the southern boundary of Monterey Bay as it juts into the Pacific. The shores are rocky, dotted with stretches of fine sandy beaches. The gentle hills that rise from the coast are covered with Monterey pine, oaks and a few stands of the endemic Monterey cypress. The climate is temperate, with fog often layering the coast in the summers, augmented by upwelling from cold Pacific waters. It is a strikingly beautiful place.
Indeed, Monterey Bay, a “blue platter” as Steinbeck describes it, is one of the most ecologically diverse regions along the California coast. Bisecting the Bay is a canyon twice the depth of the Grand Canyon. Upwelling, the movement of deep, cold water to the surface, means that plankton is abundant, supporting a web of ocean creatures, from jelly fish to humpback whales that eat plankton, krill and small crustations.
The first communities of the Monterey Peninsula were, of course, members of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation. Small bands gathered near the seashore where food was abundant—mussels, clams, abalone and fish. After Spanish missionaries and soldiers arrived in 1770, the native population was reduced by sickness and the disappearance of their nomadic lifestyles: Mission priests discouraged movement across the land and urged native people to become farmers (or, more forcefully, to work mission fields).
Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Monterey Peninsula drew Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese fishermen to its shores, and the fishing industry grew steadily for nearly a century. On-shore whaling briefly flourished in the late 19th century—Portuguese whalers dragged grey whales to shore and processed them at Point Lobos or near Seaside at the end of Monterey Bay. Chinese arrived on the Peninsula in the early 1850s; three decades later, Japanese divers joined the Chinese in harvesting squid and abalone, drying the fish and shipping much of it back to Asia. Italians fished for salmon, initially, and then for sardines. Today squid, rockfish, lingcod, salmon, sanddabs, and halibut are species most frequently caught in the Bay.
When Steinbeck lived in the region, both as a child visiting his family’s Pacific Grove summer cottage and later as an apprentice writer (1930-36) living in that cottage, the Monterey Peninsula was a lively, multicultural hub on the Pacific Coast. Artists and creative types were drawn to the Pacific shores, to the old Spanish adobes (Steinbeck long wished to own one), and to the moderate climate. Work in the canneries was plentiful. During the depression, living was affordable, as sustenance could be easily taken from the sea.
The three novellas that Steinbeck set in Monterey—Tortilla Flat (1935), Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954)—reflect the cultural diversity and ecological abundance of the region. Each novel traces community building and the importance of home and friendship, sustenance and survival. And each pays homage to the haunting beauty of the Monterey Peninsula:
They walked side by side along the dark beach toward Monterey, where the lights hung, necklace above necklace against the hill. The sand dunes crouched along the back of the beach like tired hounds, resting; and the waves gently practiced at striking, and hissed a little. (Tortilla Flat)
The Peninsula was named after the count de Monte Rey, viceroy of New Spain, by a Spanish explorer, Sebastián Vizcaíno, who in 1602 described the Bay: “we found ourselves to be in the best port that could be desired, for besides being sheltered from the winds, it has many pines for masts and yard, and live oaks and white oaks, and water in great quantity, all near the shore.”
Local resources also attracted Spanish missionaries who established a mission in 1770, the second in California, Mission San Carolos Borromeo. Although Father Junipero Serra moved the mission from Monterey to Carmel a year later (a better water supply), the lively Spanish town of Monterey grew up around a Presidio, which housed soldiers and their families. During both the Spanish and Mexican occupation of California, Monterey was the capitol of Alta California. In 1849, Colton Hall—still standing—was the site of a U.S. constitutional convention; when California became a state the next year, the capital moved to Sacramento and Monterey became a sleepier town for the next several decades.
Extending along the Bay from boundary of Spanish Monterey to the town of Pacific Grove, New Monterey was sturdily working-class. That’s where the sardine canneries were built, where brothels huddled, where the Half Way House saloon stood, where Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts had his marine biological supply lab. Ocean View Avenue, the street hugging the shore, was known locally as “Cannery Row” because it was lined with sardine canneries and reduction plants that processed the eight-inch Monterey sardine. Sardines were packed into oval cans, a popular product during both world wars, when soldiers and others relied on this tasty source of protein. A greater percentage of the fish, however, were reduced to chicken feed or fertilizer, a far more lucrative business. As the sardine numbers declined after 1948, canneries gradually shut down and the Monterey fishing industry diversified.
In 1957, Ocean View Avenue was renamed Cannery Row in recognition of Steinbeck’s novella and its lively fishing heritage.
Today “The Row” is anchored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, located where the Hovden Cannery once stood, the last to close in 1973. The street that Steinbeck knew—lined with canneries, brothels, residences and small businesses—is now a lively tourist destination with elegant hotels and restaurants. But remnants of Steinbeck’s Row remain: Ed Ricketts’s Pacific Biological Laboratory huddles next to an old cannery, and cattycorner across the street is the Wing Chong Market, made famous in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, its sign intact. The “chicken walk” where the Cannery Row bums walk to the Palace Flop House is now Bruce Ariss Way, a green swath where three fishermen’s shacks have been moved, each noting the ethnic diversity of the New Monterey fishing industry.
In Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck describes the difference between Monterey and Pacific Grove:
Pacific Grove and Monterey sit side by side on a hill bordering the bay. The two towns touch shoulders but they are not alike. Whereas Monterey was founded a long time ago by foreigners, Indians and Spaniards and such, and the town grew up higgledy-piggledy without plan or purpose, Pacific Grove sprang full blown from the iron heart of a psycho-ideo-legal religion.
Founded as a Methodist retreat in 1875, Pacific Grove was a quiet, conservative, tidy community—briefly gated in the 19th century to ensure its safety and integrity. Streets were carefully laid out in a grid under cypress and pines, and people bought or rented 30x60-foot lots and lived in canvas tents for the summer. Like many other visitors who fell in love with the cool weather and stunning shoreline, Steinbeck’s family built a summer home in sedate Pacific Grove, a 1000 square foot home two blocks from the Bay, where young Steinbeck would swim and poke around in the intertidal. A lively Chautauqua season was held in the town, attracting residents from the Central Valley to the temperate coast. Undoubtedly Steinbeck’s mother attended many of these edifying lectures.
From inception, the Pacific Coast Assembly encouraged visitors to collect objects from nature to supply the natural history museum—an early citizen science initiative. A Natural History Museum was built to house this collection, and young John Steinbeck must have visited, must have had his curiosity sparked by the extensive exhibits of local flora and fauna. Ecologically minded Pacific Grove was also the first town in California to protect its shoreline. In 1931 the spirited and well-educated woman mayor, Dr. Julia Platt, created a law ensuring local protection and thus established the first marine protected area in California. In Sweet Thursday, Ed Ricketts walks along this shoreline to the Point Pinos lighthouse and to the Great Tide Pool on the Pacific.
A railroad once chugged along the Bay to its terminus in Pacific Grove, where it turned around to head back to San Francisco. Trains brought wealthy tourists to the lavish Hotel Del Monte in Monterey (which opened in 1880) and to the popular Mammoth Stables (over 95 horses!) in Pacific Grove; Northbound trains loaded sardine products to be shipped out of San Francisco or Oakland. In Pacific Grove, the tracks ran past the dahlia garden where the Cannery Row gopher ends up looking for a mate. Today the train bed has been turned into a bike and walking path that winds along the Pacific coast, and then along the Bay through Pacific Grove, New Monterey and beyond to Seaside and Marina.
Unlike Spanish Monterey and Methodist Pacific Grove, Carmel is at heart an artists’ retreat. It was founded in the early 20th century by a real estate developer who wanted to attract “brain workers”—read Stanford professors—and other artistic types to enjoy the pristine white sand of Carmel Bay and the rocky promontories of nearby Point Lobos. Early residents were Jack London and writer Mary Austin, as well as poet George Sterling. Legend has it that the bohemian group gathered often at the beach to enjoy abalone, and they wrote silly verse to celebrate their satisfying meal.
Other artists and writers followed, perhaps the best-known being poet Robinson Jeffers, journalist Lincoln Steffens, photographer Edward Weston, and briefly, Langston Hughes.
Steinbeck didn’t care for Carmel, a town he thought was full of artistic pretenders. That said, he was inspired to write In Dubious Battle by the liberal and socially engaged Lincoln Steffens, whose house he often visited. He attended meetings of the John Reed club, also attended by Steffens and his wife, Ella Winter. And he avidly read the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a poet whose ecological sensibilities informed his second novel, To a God Unknown.