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Article: Steinbeck might not know `new'Cannery Row
- Article from:
- The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI)
- Article date:
- September 9, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1998 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Before there was a chamber of commerce to blush with shame, the
author John Steinbeck described Cannery Row as "a poem, a stink, a
grating noise, a quality of life, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a
dream." "Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron
and rust and splintered wood, 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."
That was a half-century ago. Today Cannery Row is crowded with
tourists, not fish packers, and fancy aquarium fish have taken the
place of the modest sardine. Instead of honky-tonks and whorehouses,
there ...