Cannery Row

A few hundred yards of the Monterey waterfront during the Depression, when the street was a run of sardine canneries, flophouses and grocery stores between the bay and the hill. Steinbeck maps his real neighbours onto invented names: Doc's Western Biological is Ed Ricketts's Pacific Biological Laboratories, still standing on the street now named Cannery Row; Lee Chong's grocery, the Palace Flophouse and Dora's Bear Flag are drawn from the shops and houses of ill repute that really lined it. The tide pools where Doc collects run out to the tip of the peninsula at Point Pinos.

Mack and the boys

Cannery Row (Ocean View Avenue)

Chapter 1

The opening pans the length of the street at dawn: the canneries, the whistles that call the shifts, the tin and rust and the gathered life of the place. It is the frame for everything that follows, a poem and a stink and a habit, as the narrator has it.

Chapter 1

explicit The street of the title is the real waterfront strip of sardine canneries in Monterey, then Ocean View Avenue and renamed Cannery Row in 1958 after the book; the whole novel takes place along it.

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Lee Chong

Lee Chong's Grocery

Chapter 1

The grocery that stocks everything from fatback to fireworks and quietly extends credit to the whole street. When Lee Chong takes an abandoned fish-meal shack in payment of a debt, and Mack and the boys move into it, the shop becomes the pivot of the neighbourhood's economy.

Chapter 1

inferred Lee Chong's crowded grocery is invented but placed on the Row itself, one of the small stores that really lined the street; sited among the canneries at the heart of the neighbourhood.

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