Aquarium Sends Angry Wave Over Cannery Row

After novelist John Steinbeck turned Cannery Row into one of the main streets in American literature, the unprepossessing waterfront alley slid slowly and quietly into decline. Arson, apathy and age took turns taking their toll.

Now, however, the Row is suffering an ironic new problem: Success.

And it suffers in silence no longer.

A noisy controversy has enveloped the year-old Monterey Bay Aquarium--which is praised by some as one of the finest museums of its type--and its effect on the other businesses built into the old fish-canning plants along the Row.

In the year after it opened, in October, 1984, the aquarium attracted 2.3 million visitors--more than twice the number anticipated. This unexpected popularity has engaged merchants, city leaders and the aquarium in a three-way controversy over parking, traffic, slackened souvenir sales and declining dinner reservations.

Simmering for Months

The controversy has been simmering for months. And it may come to a boil again Tuesday, when the aquarium is scheduled to respond to the council’s decision last month to limit operating hours and restrict the types of items the aquarium may sell in its gift shop-bookstore, ostensibly to ease nighttime parking problems. The aquarium claimed that the changes would cut into the funding of its research and education programs.

Carl Anderson, director of public facilities for the city, said the aquarium wants the council to rescind those restrictions. In exchange, it will offer to limit bookstore sales to people who actually tour the aquarium and provide onsite parking for all nighttime events.

“It’s become an extraordinarily emotional issue,” said Anderson, who runs the agency that provides public parking. “I think there was an unusually high expectation that merchants would double or triple or quadruple their business, and it just didn’t happen.”

Indeed, some merchants claim that they have actually lost business, accusing the city of letting the aquarium use its nonprofit status, and the tax breaks that result, to run a gift store and restaurant against which regular businesses cannot compete.

The city argues that the problem is chiefly one of inadequate parking, which the aquarium has worsened by overstepping the admittedly imprecise restrictions--including those against selling souvenirs, hosting banquets and staying open nights--imposed when the facility was approved by the city.

Aquarium officials, citing marketing research, deny that merchants have been hurt at all, and assert that the problem is limited exclusively to the lack of parking--a problem they have offered to help solve, but one they contend is primarily the fault of the city.

“It’s just inconceivable to us that bringing 2.3 million people past your door would have a negative effect on business,” said Hank Armstrong, public relations director for the aquarium.

Competing for Same Space

Attendance this year has fallen, but still is expected to total 1.7 million people. In future, attendance is expected to level off, with about 1.6 million people visiting the huge, three-story tanks that simulate the submarine environment of Monterey Bay.

The problem is that those visitors are competing for the same space along the Row and in nearby parking lots that formerly were the exclusive province of people patronizing the Row’s other attractions.

It is a question of too much success--of too many customers crowding each other out. The problem likely would have amused Steinbeck, whose 1945 novel “Cannery Row” described a wonderland of “chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whorehouses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”

And that was when the canneries were still operating, before the Row really went to seed. The area came back in the 1960s and ‘70s, when gift shops, fancy restaurants, hotels and other tourist-oriented businesses set up shop inside the cavernous, dead canneries.

Anderson said the problem would not be so acute if the earliest attendance projection of 500,000 annual visitors were correct, because that number could be absorbed by existing parking. Even the revised estimate of 1 million might have been accommodated.

But current attendance will require a 1,017-space garage now being designed by the city. That garage, however, will not be open for at least two years, he said. In the meantime, “Old Row” merchants say they are suffering as their old customers are staying away in wallet-walloping droves.

“For us specialty dealers, it has dug into our steady, regular customers,” said Alicia Harby-De Noon, who stocks a dazzling display of clothes and jewelry from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. “No one wants to come down here any more.

“I support the aquarium; I love it and what it’s done,” she added, echoing a sentiment related by most other Row merchants. “I’m just totally against the city letting the retail (operations at the aquarium) get out of hand.”

“The argument is that they (aquarium officials) have ‘made’ Cannery Row,” said Derek Cockshut of the Cannery Row Merchants Assn. “Well, I was here before the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and I was doing very well--and so were many others. They are destroying a commercial infrastructure that has been here for 10 or 15 years.”

Anderson said the pinch felt by merchants could have as much to do with the aquarium’s displays as with its bookstore and cafeteria.

“You don’t have people browsing as long in the gift stores as they used to because they now have something else to look at--the aquarium,” he said.

Merchants Applauded Limits

When the City Council announced new restrictions on the aquarium--limiting the number of evening events and the sale of such non-education souvenir items as cans of sardine-shaped milk-chocolate novelties and “Great White (shark)” brand wine--merchants applauded.

Aquarium officials, on the other hand, reacted sharply.

David Packard, the computer giant who founded the aquarium, lambasted “this hostile action.” He accused the council of ignoring the will of most Monterey residents and darkly hinted at potential alternatives the aquarium might face, “ranging from serious legal action to closing the facility to the public.”

Since that low ebb in relations between the aquarium and the city, a number of people, including some Row merchants, have urged conciliation.

Cooperation Urged

Margo and Harold (Mac) McSwain, owners of The Monterey Bay Co., a gift shop on the Row, went so far as to pay $800 for a half-page ad in the Monterey Peninsula Herald urging “cooperation between friends and neighbors--not between antagonists.”

The ad earned McSwain an angry invitation to quit the Merchants Assn. board of directors, but he is convinced that it was worth it.

“I got tired of all the abuse from customers,” he said. “They’d come in and ask, ‘Why do you hate the aquarium?’ I got tired of telling them I don’t hate the aquarium. Really, I’m getting tired of the whole thing.”

“Jeepers,” added Margo, sounding genuinely disgusted. “It makes me so angry.”