A Historic Monterey Bay Hotel

The fishing village's crude structures were built on the shoreline, many directly on the rocks, close to the water which supplied their livelihood. The settlement prospered by harvesting fish, abalone, sea urchin, kelp, squid and anything else which could be open-air dried and shipped back to China. The ability of the Chinese to use a wide variety of marine life gave them a broad menu, as well as prevented any one species from being overfished. When the railroad connected to Monterey in 1880, it opened up markets for fresh fish to the Chinese. It also quickly brought in competition from the increasing number of European fishermen drawn to the area. The intensifying competition for fishing eventually moved the Chinese out to the water of Carmel Bay, as Monterey continued to grow as a prosperous fishing port. In 1906, and against a backdrop of racial prejudice and restrictive laws against Chinese Californians, a fire swept through the village at China Point, effectively ending their influence in Monterey's fishing industry. In the search for a viable alternative site to reconstruct their settlement, the remaining Chinese families eventually signed a long-term lease with Scotsman John B McAbee. They established a new but smaller Chinatown on the beach, putting them slightly closer to town and on the street known as Ocean View Avenue. That beach has now come to bear McAbee's name. The lovely little golden sand beach had experienced the activity of completely different nature decades before the new Chinatown. In the late 1880s, Portuguese whaling crews used McAbee Beach, then un-named, to launch their boats in pursuit of whales migrating across the Monterey Bay. When harpooned, the injured whale would take the longboat on a harrowing "Nantucket sleigh ride" until it expired, at which point the crew would row the carcass back to the beach - the site of a "try-works" - where the whales were flensed and their blubber rendered into oil. The whaling era eventually passed and was replaced by John McAbee's tent-cottage and boat rental business. When the Chinese leased the beach, building their new and smaller Chinatown, they replaced the short-lived recreational use of the shoreline and made way for what would become a bustling, industrialized street. The new Chinese settlement on McAbee beach engaged in general commerce with the community. They also established the Monterey Fish and Cannery Company, which processed the fish heads and offal [organs and entrails] "waste" from the other canneries into fertilizer. But by the mid-1920s, the Chinese families began to disperse, moving their homes to a more permanent Chinese district in downtown Monterey and their business farther down the Row. This provided the optimistic entrepreneur Maen Change Wu and his family an opportunity to build a stylish hotel on the scenic and now empty beach. The three-story, dragon-roofed Ocean View Hotel was initially so popular that an annex, the Venice Apartments, was built across the street in 1929. However, the overpowering industrial direction of the street created conditions that bore dire consequences for the once-proud little hotel. The fashionable trade to which the Ocean View Hotel had opened its doors quickly ceased its patronage of the Chinese jewel on McAbee Beach as it was visited by a fate never foreseen by its creators.

The venerable little hotel above McAbee Beach bore silent witness to the passage of Cannery Row, from its infancy to its rise as the heart of the "Sardine Capital of the World", to its abrupt demise. When the entire Sardine industry fell, the hotel remained through the grey, ghost-like pall that shrouded the area, watching as the once powerful industrial area was left abandoned and disintegrating for years. Fate eventually called upon the old hotel, when, in 1983, it became one of the most important sites of Cannery Row's rediscovery and renaissance. Perhaps more important than any other establishment in Cannery Row's early reawakening was the unassuming restaurant that opened in the early 50s in the aging hotel. Neil de Vaughn repurposed the formerly elegant dining room of the Ocean View. His restaurant's popular success proved that people would come to the blighted former canning district for a good meal, even amongst the strange, ghost-like ruins of the once-powerful center of industry. The café quickly became popular with locals and drew an increasing number of Monterey visitors curious about John Steinbeck's legendary "Cannery Row." Today, across the street from the luxurious elegance of the Spindrift Inn, the Venice Apartments' original dragon-style roof is one of Cannery Row's few reminders of the important influence and contributions of its early Chinese investors and inhabitants. From the Spindrift Inn's vantage point, the history of the Row is exposed through its artifacts. The forgotten concrete holding tanks on McAbee Beach, once used to hold sardines and offal waiting to be rendered into fertilizer; the rusty pipes and pilings, sometimes submerged, sometimes exposed in the gentle surf; the once abandoned canneries and warehouses remodeled into shops and restaurants; and the classic cross-over bridging over Cannery Row, once instrumental in connecting the warehouses to their front line canneries on the edge of the ocean. The history and romantic nostalgia of Cannery Row fill every view from the award-winning Spindrift Inn. When, in 1984, the Spindrift Inn opened, it replaced the ambitious Ocean View Hotel with a successor worthy of its location and its past. Architect Paul Davis explained that "the design for the Spindrift Inn was to create the intimate style of a small, fine, turn of the century hotel that patrons of that era would have sought on Monterey's scenic coastline. The compact scale and elegant design of the Spindrift Inn evokes a nostalgic element of intimacy and romantic luxury for today's guests of the Cannery Row renascence."