Ed Ricketts Saw the Collapse Coming: Cannery Row's Real Story

The two-story wooden building at eight hundred Cannery Row is not a restaurant, not a hotel, not a wine bar. It is a California State Historic Landmark: Pacific Biological Laboratories, where Ed Ricketts ran a marine biology supply company and thought more clearly about Monterey Bay than anyone else who has ever lived near it.

Ricketts was the model for Doc in John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row," a fact that has, in a certain way, buried him. The novel made him a character. The character became a mascot. The mascot became a logo for the tourist district, and somewhere in that process the actual Ed Ricketts, marine biologist and scientific writer, got lost.

What Ricketts actually did was observe the bay with enough rigor to understand what was about to happen to it. Working with a Fish and Game scientist named Frances Clark, he co-authored warnings, by the late nineteen thirties, that the sardine population was being fished beyond recovery. Overfishing, combined with shifting ocean temperatures and declining plankton availability, was going to devastate the fishery. Nobody with a financial stake in the canneries wanted to hear it.

The industry's peak came in the nineteen forty-one to nineteen forty-two season, when Monterey's canneries packed more than two hundred fifty thousand tons of sardines. That was the top. By the early nineteen fifties, the catch had fallen by more than ninety percent. The canneries closed one by one. The workers, many of them women working cutting lines in deafening, reeking conditions, were laid off with no severance and no safety net. The street emptied.

Ricketts was killed in nineteen forty-eight when his car was struck by the Del Monte Express train at a grade crossing on Wave Street, months before the collapse became impossible to deny. He was fifty years old. He had been right about everything.

The collapse, when it came, was sudden and total. By nineteen fifty-three, the sardine catch had fallen from the nineteen forty-two peak to less than twenty thousand tons. The canneries had employed four thousand people at peak operation. Within a decade, Cannery Row was a ghost street, the buildings empty, the smell of fish oil soaked permanently into the wood. Steinbeck wrote a second Cannery Row novel in nineteen fifty-four, called "Sweet Thursday," set in the ruins. The irony that the books celebrating the street's working life became the engine of its transformation into a tourist attraction is one that does not require embellishment.

The building at eight hundred Cannery Row still has the sign. If you look past the wine bars and the hotel lobbies on this street, you can find it. The man who warned them all, and was ignored, is the one whose name they put on the landmark.