Steinbeck Plaza

Steinbeck Plaza features a bronze statue of the writer John Steinbeck, cast in his trademark wool cap and jacket, leaning against a railing. It marks the site where the old sardine packing industry once defined the economy of Monterey. In the nineteen forties, the smell of canning fish filled the air here every day. When the sardine population collapsed in the late nineteen fifties, the canneries closed. The plaza honors the literary world Steinbeck built from the wreckage of those factories.