The street made world famous by John Steinbeck?EUR??,,????'???s 1945 fictional bestseller, Cannery Row, was originally a wagon-rutted coastal dirt road that led from Monterey to a Chinese settlement at ?EUR??,,????'??China Point?EUR??,,????'?? (Point Alones), established in the early 1850s. It was this Chinese settlement, populated largely by fishing families arriving directly from China by junk, that began the fishing industry for which Monterey would become famous a century later. In the late 1800s, Portuguese shore-whaling and salmon fishing were conducted off the rocky shoreline and small beaches below the road. The construction of the railroad to Monterey, and to its lavish Hotel Del Monte, brought vacationers and fashionable tourism to the former (and still sleepy) Spanish-Mexican capital of Alta California. The railroad also brought immigration to the Monterey Bay region. Among these immigrants, were the Italian (Genovese) fisherman that would pressure, challenge and eventually drive the Chinese from fishing primacy on the bay. At the turn of the century, salmon was the fishing industry?EUR??,,????'???s mainstay; the bountiful Monterey sardine, however, was simply too plentiful to ignore. So, the early salmon buyers at Monterey became salmon canners ?EUR??,,????'??+ principally Frank Booth, who, in 1902, built Monterey?EUR??,,????'???s first real cannery adjacent to the fisherman?EUR??,,????'???s wharf in the harbor Fishing technology at Monterey at the time was archaic and inefficient; the canning process was equally crude. The unsightliness, smell and processing waste from Booth?EUR??,,????'???s harbor cannery dictated that all future canneries would have to locate out ?EUR??,,????'??Ocean View Avenue?EUR??,,????'?? ?EUR??,,????'??+ the coastal road toward China Point. Sicilians and their lampara net fishing techniques, coupled with the inventive genius of a Norwegian immigrant with fishing industry experience, Knut Hovden, began a decade of improvement in the technology of fishing and canning that positioned Monterey?EUR??,,????'???s burgeoning sardine industry for rapid and enormous expansion (due in part to the food and ration demands created by World War I). A major recession after the war evolved into the Roaring Twenties and the stink of sardine processing ?EUR??,,????'??+ especially the grinding and baking of even edible sardines into fishmeal ?EUR??,,????'??+ became the controversial smell of prosperity. Monterey?EUR??,,????'???s fishing and canning industries limped through the Great Depression. Food, at least, in the sardine business was not in critical supply. But the deprivations and hardships of the 1930s set the stage on a street lined with sardine factories for one of the best read stories ever to emerge from American literature: John Steinbeck?EUR??,,????'???s Cannery Row. In the intellectual company of pioneering marine biologist Edward Ricketts and his friends on old Ocean View Avenue in the early 1930s, John Steinbeck lived first-hand the scenes and locations of his charming (if only slightly fictional) accounts of life and times on Cannery Row by one of the most colorful cast of characters in American literature. The canning boom driven by World War II saw Monterey become the "Sardine Capital of the World," processing nearly a quarter million tons of sardines a season in its peak wartime years ?EUR??,,????'??+ to less than 1,000 tons per season in the mid 1950s. The sardines had disappeared! Economic devastation settled in on Monterey's fishing and canning industries, ending Monterey's major economic engine. Years of decline, disintegration, fire and collapse set in on a street of fish canneries without the fish. But the curious came to see the old canneries and experience the funky, ghostlike revival of the area as a tourist attraction ?EUR??,,????'??+ due largely to the magic Steinbeck's fiction. The street was officially renamed Cannery Row in 1958. Today, Cannery Row enjoys a commercial, historical and literary renaissance as the major tourism destination in Monterey. An eclectic array of fine restaurants, hotels, activities and shopping of every kind abound to serve the millions of visitors to Cannery Row each year on the once dusty coastal road ?EUR??,,????'??+ a street inseparable from its literary and historical heritage.