2021 UPDATE: Please contact Inga Waite for information about future tours (831-646-5640). Outdated contact info has been removed from this post.
LEARN CANNERY ROW HISTORY AT THE LAB! A rare chance to tour “Ed Ricketts’ Pacific Biological Laboratories” at 800 Cannery Row will be offered SATURDAY, FEB. 23.
The annual STEINBECK BIRTHDAY TOURS are given by tour guides from the non-profit Cannery Row Foundation. Steinbeck was born Feb. 27, 1902. INVITE YOUR FRIENDS!
Speakers during each tour will talk about the Lab’s front room, the Ricketts/Steinbeck relationship, the private Men’s Club which operated later in the Lab, and about the outside area tanks to hold ocean specimens.Then guests will go into Ricketts’ basement lab, with some of his original equipment and specimens on display and where docents will talk about the biology, Ricketts’ contribution to marine science, and how the field is changing.
The Lab building is where Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck conceived and planned their 1940 “Voyage of Science and Leisure” to Baja California’s Sea of Cortez on the famed Monterey purse-seiner, the “Western Flyer” and described in Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.”
A donation of $15 or more to the Cannery Row Foundation by cash or check at the door is requested. Since 1983, the Cannery Row Foundation has helped to support the research on, and exhibition of Cannery Row’s famous historic, literary, and ecological legacies.
Guests are encouraged to bring cameras, dress in layers, and enjoy a rare opportunity to be inside the Lab for tours by historians, literary scholars, marine biologists, and Cannery Row Foundation docents (“Row Rat” volunteers). Refreshments will be available, and visitors will have a chance to wander Pacific Biological Laboratories.
