"Cannery Row, Again"
© MK Hemp 1993
Chapter One

816 Wave

    I wish you could have seen it, almost hidden under the two huge, dark Monterey cypress that spread over it. Some of their branches bent to almost touch the ground. From Wave Street its disintegrating green tar paper roof and dingy gray shingles blended into the cypress and the weeds and huge agave "century plants" at the gutter. A weathered and nearly digested green picket fence showed in places through the growth along the narrow dirt path that served as a sidewalk. The weedy lot, itself chest high in mallow and agave and echium, swept downward to a steep bluff overlooking the back door of the Wing Chong across the Southern Pacific tracks.
    816 was a silent, forlorn, overgrown, derelict of extreme neglect; a house beyond use for everything but the artist studio it had been for the old Spaniard, Paco Ferro, and later his friend Jerry Wasserman. Now vacant and unused, it had no gas or electricity. Just water. It had long ago outlived its habitability, and if it hadn't become old Paco's painting studio, and Jerry Wasserman's after that, it probably would have been pushed down long ago. But it had not; it was chosen to bear silent witness to the passing of the entire history of old Ocean View Avenue in Monterey as the "Sardine Capital of the World." And much more.
    Its location, perched above the back of the Wing Chong Market, afforded clear views of most of the neighborhood and the canneries spread out along both the oceanside and trackside of Ocean View Avenue. Its view next door to the left crossed two vacant lots for lease, to the worn old Ferguson house. On the furthest lot over, next to Ferguson's, there had been a long, narrow, almost windowless building built to store fishmeal. This was the actual structure John Steinbeck describes as the Palace Flophouse in "Cannery Row." The Palace was actually the nickname, though, for a rough tri-plex for cannery workers across the unfinished Irving Avenue extension below Wave Street, sharing its narrow fifty foot wide Wave Street lot with the old Joss House from China Point.
    Before the Monterey Bay Aquarium bought the rundown little Ferguson house at 866 Wave Street, beyond the fishmeal barn site, it spent years peeling paint and shingles, its outside plumbing like huge arteries angling across its vertical batten ribs. It had inherited three shacks, actually joined shed-like shanties, at the foot of its lot above the tracks, sometime around World War I. They may have originally been Chinese, but were inhabited from the twenties onward by impoverished male cannery workers pulling long shifts at Hovden's. The only view beyond Ferguson's and the shacks from 816 was the two-story brick Baker house on the corner of Wave Street and David Avenue. It was known as "The Old Coast House" before it was also acquired and renovated by the Aquarium for offices.
    In the thirties, Mrs. Baker had a huge Blue Persian cat that disappeared almost every week after Ed Ricketts moved his biological supply business and laboratory from Fountain Avenue in Pacific Grove to 800 Ocean View Avenue, on Cannery Row. He paid the neighborhood kids and some of the local cannery workers to catch cats to fill orders for biology dissection classes. He paid 25 cents each; no pet cats accepted. Well, whenever her big blue Persian was missing, Mrs. Baker would come roaring down the hill to the lab with her aprons flying to retrieve her cat. Sure enough, it was there; Ed knew it was her cat and was usually waiting for her arrival and its return; he had given a quarter for it--almost an hour's wages in the canneries--but never seemed able to recall exactly to whom he'd given it.
    Across Wave Street from the Baker House was the neat and proper home of Anotnia Caballo, matriarch of the Spanish families working the canneries, who in her nineties sat in her rocker on the front porch and watched the days pass. Her anonymous surveillance was broken occasionally to lean to the porch rail and exchange a frail wagging wave for the salutation by the man using 816 Wave Street. Her place was torn down with no ado to make a parking lot, along with nearly the whole block her home was a part of. It had come to be called the "Saunders block" for the plumbing company owner that had eventually acquired all but a few old houses like the Caballo's on the block bounded by Wave Street and Irving Avenue, Foam Street and David Avenue.
    How 816 Wave Street survived at all into the 1980's was a mystery. But as far back as anyone can remember, it was there. The Longueiras sold it in 1928 to build their stucco house, a small mansion by Cannery Row standards of the time, next door at 800 Wave. The bungalow at 816 Wave served as shelter for a number of families, most of whom were cannery workers. It evidently also served as an "annex" to at least one of the Row's bordellos, where the oldest trade could be conducted more discreetly than in the parlors at Flora's "Lone Star" or Edith Luciano's "La Ida Cafe."
    The compact geography of the immediate area around 816 Wave Street is important to understanding what John Steinbeck did in interpreting this neighborhood he knew so well, when describing "Cannery Row" largely from memory, in New York, in 1944. It contains almost all of the major sites in his Cannery Row fiction.
    Irving Avenue came down the steep New Monterey hillside, crossed Lighthouse Avenue and Foam Street, its pavement ending at the intersection with Wave Street. The steep bluff above the Southern Pacific railroad tracks kept the street from going through the last block to Ocean View Avenue. If it had, it would have ended up right at the door of Ed Ricketts' Pacific Biological Lab at 800 Ocean View Avenue. It would also have passed between the actual "Palace Flophouse" and the Longueira's above the tracks. Below the tracks it was more alley-like, separating Flora Wood's "Lone Star Cafe" from the "vacant lot" filled with pipes and discarded cannery boilers and its black cypress, as Steinbeck describes in "Cannery Row."
    For some years in the 1930s, a set of long planks with cleats nailed across them was the only way for locals and cannery workers to safely scale the dirt embankment leading up from the S.P. tracks to the unfinished half-block of Irving Street. The "chicken walk," as  referred to in "Cannery Row," is perhaps only important in that it led directly to one of John Steinbeck's most famous fictional places: the Palace Flophouse.

10/31/10

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An 816 Wave Street album