Monterey's Cannery Workers' Shacks: living witnesses to Cannery Row's labour history

Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, California, came to be known as 'Cannery Row' thanks to John Steinbeck's 1945 novel. According to editorial notes from Atlas Obscura, from 1902 to the mid-1950s this coastal stretch operated as the epicentre of the sardine canning industry and as an industrial zone with more than 30 canneries and marine docks.

At the peak of the industry, Cannery Row factories employed up to 4,000 workers and Monterey was known as 'the sardine capital of the world.' Stanford University Pacific Historian Centre researcher Dr Robert Lloyd said 'the sardine industry drew labour of Asian, European and Latin American origins along the Pacific coast; this multi-ethnic structure formed the identity of Cannery Row.'

Factory owners required the workforce to live nearby so that the sardine processing operations could continue uninterrupted. To meet this need, hundreds of single-room wooden shacks were built along the coastal strip. According to Atlas Obscura's description, most of the shacks housed Filipino, Japanese, Italian, Mexican and Portuguese immigrant workers.

Monterey Municipal Historical Commission member Lisa Maddalena said 'the shacks were not just housing for workers but also the centre of community life for the workforce; dinner, child care and religious rituals took place in these structures.' A significant portion of these shacks were built between 1930 and 1945; only nine have survived to the present.

After the Second World War, the sardine industry collapsed due to overfishing and environmental conditions that affected sardine life cycles. Steinbeck's novel documented the final years before this collapse. California Academy of Sciences researcher Dr Brian Kennedy published a study showing the collapse occurred between 1947 and 1953 and that half of the deviation in sardine abundance was due to human factors and half to climatic variability. Kennedy said 'the collapse of Cannery Row was an early warning of unsustainable fishing policies.'

With the closure of the sardine factories, the shacks gradually fell into disrepair or were demolished. In the 1970s, the City of Monterey placed the remaining nine shacks under historic-heritage status protection. Restoration of the shacks, which were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, was carried out under the coordination of the California State Parks Department.

Some of the shacks are today used as an education centre by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation. The Foundation's chief education officer Sandra Kasky said 'conveying the personal stories of labour history to today's schoolchildren is an important task for both local identity and the history of working life.' Some 12,000 students participate in these education programmes annually.

From a cultural history perspective, Steinbeck's Cannery Row is an important literary document of the daily life of workers living in the shacks. Dr Susan Shillinglaw, Director of the Steinbeck Foundation, said 'although the characters in the novel are from very different ethnic origins, the depiction of the solidarity structure within the working class of Cannery Row is fed from a realistic base.' Editions of the novel published after 1945 inspired social history studies for Pacific coast cities.

In terms of local tourism, the shacks are among the important stops on Monterey's 'Cannery Row Historical Walk' programme. According to the annual report of the Monterey History Foundation, 350,000 visitors toured the historic structures in the Cannery Row district in 2024. Approximately 40 percent of the conservation and maintenance costs of the shacks are met through visitor contributions.

In a general context, the Cannery Row shacks offer tangible evidence in the twentieth-century industrialisation history of the United States of how worker housing shaped cities. Dr Megan Friedel, curator of the Pacific Labour History Department of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, said 'the preservation of this many single-room wooden shacks is a rare reference point for US industrial history research.' Friedel announced that the shacks would be included in a new cataloguing study in collaboration with the Smithsonian within the next 10 years. This article has been prepared for historical analysis.