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From cannery to aquarium
The aquarium stands on the site of the Hovden Cannery, a sardine cannery on Cannery Row that closed in 1973. In the late 1970s four marine biologists proposed an aquarium there, and in April 1978 David and Lucile Packard created the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation, which bought the property.


Opening day, 1984
The architects EHDD designed the building to echo the cannery, keeping its old boiler house as an exhibit. The aquarium opened on 20 October 1984 as the largest public aquarium in the United States, and the first to show a living kelp forest.
Into the open sea
The Open Sea wing, opened in 1996, almost doubled the exhibit space with galleries of jellies and open-ocean life. Its largest exhibit holds 1.2 million US gallons of water, and a deep-sea exhibition followed in April 2022.


