Kathlyn Clore

(This was originally published in my local newspaper, to which I contribute occasionally. It’s here.)

An autumn moon rises over the pink sunset on Monterey Bay as Kathleen Tarp calls out to the day’s final visitors at the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation Gallery. Constantly smiling, she chats up a middle-aged couple visiting from Ohio. On a wooden easel, a trumpeter wearing a purple beret plays colorful jazz against a previous Pacific coast sunset Tarp captured in vivid strokes of oil paint.

Tarp is one of 31 local artists who display and sell their work in the waterfront gallery at 425 Cannery Row.

“Artists and Cannery Row go together like Coke and pizza. We have a history of artists being here on the Row,” said Dick Crispo, the notable local artist who helped start the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation at a 1981 meeting in his living room.

Crispo looks on from a second-story window as Tarp locks up and descends into the night. His home, studio and personal gallery is next door to the collective’s gallery, which was his boyhood home.

“People come here looking for artists because they associate artists and writers with Cannery Row,” Crispo said.

Cannery Row was made famous in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel of the same name. Even then, Steinbeck’s first-chapter descriptio of Monterey’s sardine-canning district reads like an elegy, as though he sensed the rowdy character of the place would disappear.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light . . . a nostalgia, a dream,” he wrote.

Fish are no longer caught or canned here as they were then, when the smokestacks and corrugated metal of sardine canneries dominated the waterfront.

But the flavor of the Row as Steinbeck depicted it lives on in the vibrant characters making their living on this meandering street.

Among them are local businessmen braving the frigid business climate. There’s the local firefighter who opened a frozen yogurt shop in July. In the same month, a pair of brothers from Utah began selling gourmet sardines, bringing the oily fish back to the Row for the first time in 50 years. A family of Nepalese immigrants opened an import shop in September and a family of Thai-Americans began filling a tiny shop with startlingly uniform hand-knit hats in October.

The newcomers join the entrenched businesses that have thrived in the area for decades, including the Sardine Factory, the Whaling Station, the Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa, and the kitsch shops in the Bear Flag Building. The Intercontinental recently opened a waterfront resort known as The Clement. Mix in the franchise presence - Bubba Gump’s, El Torito, the Chart House and the Holiday Inn - and Cannary Row is a premier tourist destination.

But if there is a keystone of Cannery Row, a central focus to ensure enough business to ensure sales of the “catch of the day” remain high enough to pay the dishwasher, its the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The Aquarium, which marked its 25th anniversary on October 25, 2009, is today the main draw for visitors to Cannery Row. Aquarium officials estimate that in 2009 about 1.9 million visitors will enter and be inspired by the magical worlds of live kep forests, sea-horses, sea otters and jellyfish.

AGE OF AQUARIUM

“It really anchors one end of Cannery Row,” said Mimi Hahn, the aquarium’s director of marketing. “And in our surveys we see that people find our exhibits actually inspiring. … When you come to the aquarium, you’re seeing what’s right under the water.”

Nearly all the sea life available to watch or touch in the aquarium connects to the ecosystem of Monterey Bay itself. Some staff like to say a visit to the aquarium is akin to strolling through the underwater neighborhoods of Monterey, Hahn said.

In addition to enchanting exhibits like The Secret Life of Seahorses, a local ecological focus is part of how the aquarium creates a unique sense of place for its millions of visitors.

In 2006, aquarium staff began partnering with local restaurants to cultivate awareness in Cannery Row kitchens about sustainable seafood eating habits. Twenty-four restaurants participate in the free partnership, in which they are asked not to serve seafood that is on the aquarium’s “red list.” The partnership seeks to helps tourists and locals quickly implement consumer knowledge they glean at the aquarium.

“People who go to the aquarium are generally environmentally aware and they choose restaurants that are similarly motivated,” said Sheila Bowman, senior manager of outreach and education for the Seafood Watch program.

Many are also interested in cutting back on paper. In January, the program unveiled a free iPhone application version of its Seafood Watch card. The application displays three categories of seafood supper options: Green for best choice, yellow for good alternatives and red for seafood to avoid at the table.

“We like the overall idea that people could carry around their iphone and have better and more current information than someone who has a piece of paper,” Bowman said. “That way you don’t just read the list on paper. You can click through the list and read why you should be eating wild alaskan salmon.”

The app has been downloaded about 200,000 times.

Appropriately, sardines - the bread and butter of businessmen on the Row during the early 1900s - are on its list of best choices for seafood purchases on the West Coast. This is good news for Daren

Warnick, who opened the Cannery Row Sardine Company in July.

THEY’RE BACK: DOWN TO BUSINESS

“This area is missing sardines,” Warnick said. “I was walking to my car one day and jut thought, ‘Hey, sardines would work.’ With the history and tourism here, it just seemed to fit.”

Tucked next to the Fish Hopper restaurant, Warnick’s shop in July began selling boneless, skinless sardines for about $7 a can, in addition to other canned seafood. With his kitschy label on T-shirts and the sardines receiving good reviews among foodies, business is good, Warnick said. Whole Foods will also soon begin stocking Warnick’s sardines, which are fished from as far north as Washington.

Cannery Row Sardine Company is one of a spate of new businesses on Monterey with plans to become mainstays for locals and tourists. Another good bet is Myo, a self-serve frozen yogurt shop at 685 Cannery Row.

Stuart Roth, an outgoing Monterey native and career firefighter with the Monterey Fire Department, opened Myo in July with longtime buddy Paige Meyer and two additional business partners. The Row previously had no frozen yogurt shops.

Myo, for Make It Yourself, is sparklingly clean and blindingly colorful. It offers constantly changing flavors and types of frozen yogurt as well as toppings ranging from fruity pebbles to fresh fruit from Del Monte Produce.

“Cannery Row is just a magnificent spot,” he said. “It’s got everything, so much to offer. It’s a neat area, and for locals I think it is underutilized.”

Over at the Little Hat Shop, at 645 Cannery Row, Nicole Chalardpru and her family of Thai-Americans are knitting up hats in just about every color, texture and style imaginable.

Many are sized and themed for children, including a series of fruit-themed hats. Each is made by hand.

“You can’t just go anywhere and find these,” Chlardpru said. “It’s a unique product. We have fun making them. Once you start doing it, you just can’t stop.”

ARTISTS ABOUND

“I came here in 1974 for the Monterey Jazz Festival, and I thought, ‘This is where I want to get old,’” said Kathleen Tarp, a singer who has been painting for about seven years. “So I travelled all around the country doing the music thing and then came back here in 1999.”

Tarp is one of 31 artists who volunteer at the gallery one day a month so the collective can save on commission fees. Small oil, water color and mixed media prints sell for as little as $35; larger works cost more.

Tarp welcomes customers heartily, freely punctuating her remarks with an emphatic, “Right on!” She’s quick to get on the phone to other artists when customers have questions or requests for companion paintings. There is no trace of the snooty atmosphere often associated with art galleries.

“We’re artists, we don’t have any money either,” Tarp exclaims. “They’re always checking you out see if you have any money. And you know those salespeople don’t have a dime either!”

Just as much as smelly sardines, artists have always been a part of Cannery Row. In the late 60s, Crispo and other artists worked in the former Hovden Cannery, which they could rent collectively for $150 a month as long as they agreed not to damage any of the knotty pine or copper inside the former cannery.

That space is now the main entryway to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, constructed in the late 1970s with a $55 million gift from David and Lucile Packard.

Tags: California, travel

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