After 90 Years, City Still Doesn’t Know What To Make Of The Santa Monica Pier 

Peggy Clifford
Mirror Editor

Santa Monica Pier, circa 1920s.

Part I

Until the Third Street Promenade opened, the Santa Monica Pier was the city's most popular attraction. It's both a city and county landmark, the most famous structure on the famous Southern California coast. A favorite location of Hollywood film-makers since the 1920s, it's been cherished by generations of Santa Monica residents and visitors. But City Hall has never known what to make of it
   In 1973, the City Council voted to demolish it, but the demolition was blocked by a citizens' initiative, "Save Our Piers Forever." In the next municipal election, the Council members who'd supported the Pier's demolition were voted out of office.
   In 1983, following a pair of storms that destroyed much of the Pier, then-mayor Ruth Goldway vowed that the City would rebuild the Pier, which she called "the soul of Santa Monica," and restore it. The Pier was rebuilt to its original dimensions, but, after 16 years, tens of millions of dollars, innumerable Pier Restoration Corporation (PRC) development and marketing plans and endless tinkering by the City, "the soul of Santa Monica" seems to be further from salvation than ever.
   Despite the addition of the 70,000 square-foot Pacific Park, which proponents claimed would significantly increase both Pier patronage and revenue, the Pier has racked up record losses—nearly $900,000 in the last fiscal year. Today, there are fewer businesses on the Pier than ever and the mix of bar-restaurants and amusement park rides and games seems at odds with itself.
   Several weeks ago, in exchange for $50,000 a year for three years, the PRC agreed to give Pepsi the soft drink franchise on the Pier. As part of the deal, Pier lessees will receive rebates, Pepsi umbrellas and other perks. The PRC is now seeking other corporate “partners” in an effort to cut its losses Also in the works is a new service agreement between the City and the PRC, which claims that if it's given more authority, it can make the Pier work. Pier partisans are skeptical. They've already seen this movie—several times.

The Pier Is Actually Two Piers

Santa Monica Pier is actually two piers, joined more by circumstance and time than by logic. The Santa Monica Municipal Pier opened in 1909. Thirty-six feet wide, with tees at regular intervals, it stretched 1200 feet into the Pacific. It was the first pier on the west coast to use reinforced concrete pilings. Though its primary function was to carry a new city sewer line to deep water, it attracted crowds of strollers and fishermen.
   In 1916, a Coney Island showman, Charles I.D. Looff, secured a franchise from the city to construct a pleasure pier contiguous to the municipal pier on the city-owned beach. Looff’s Pier featured a Moorish-Byzantine hippodrome to house his merry-go-round, a billiards and bowling hall, a two-track Blue Streak roller coaster, a "What Is It?" maze and several smaller rides. Looff's opening day, July 4, 1917, drew over 100,000 people, the biggest crowd in the city's history.
   Though Looff's pier was successful, failing health forced him to retire soon after it opened, and all of the subsequent pleasure pier operators failed—out of either a surfeit of ambition or lack of sufficient know-how.

Stormy Weather Hits Pier

The City had no better luck with its pier. In 1919, its reinforced concrete piles failed and were replaced with traditional timber.
   In the early 1930s, the City extended its pier 400 feet and added a lower deck, and constructed a breakwater just west and north of the Pier to create a yacht harbor. Inadvertently built athwart a deep strong current which eroded its foundations, the breakwater was further weakened by a vicious storm in 1935.Charlie Chaplin was among the movie stars who leased yacht moorings but, within ten years, the sleek yachts had been crowded out by commercial fishing boats.
   In 1936, Security First National Bank foreclosed on the pleasure pier operators, took possession of the City franchise and hired Walter Newcomb, who had a business on the pier, to manage it. Seven years later, the bank sold the pier and its franchise to Newcomb for $10.  At the time, there were 55 businesses on the pier. Newcomb agreed to pay the City $250 a month for the franchise and the City agreed to extend the franchise to 1973, at which time Newcomb would be obliged to demolish his pier.
   The opening of Disneyland in 1955 killed off most of Southern California's fading old pleasure piers. Worn, even seedy, the Municipal and Newcomb Piers hung on—curiosities by then, and apparently impervious to the waves of alteration which were pulsing through Southern California.

Leaders See Beach as Promotional Device

As movie stars and moguls began building elaborate houses on the sand and Los Angeles's elite founded eleven lavish beach clubs, the Santa Monica beach north of the Pier was dubbed "the Gold Coast," but the business men who had run Santa Monica from its founding in 1875 as a profitable footnote to a failed railroad venture viewed the long, wide stretch of sand not as the gorgeous natural thing it was, but as a promotional tool to be exploited.
   Bounded on one side by Los Angeles, one of America's largest, most diverse and unbuttoned cities and on the other side by the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica remained remarkably insulated against both. In its first hundred years, a half-dozen major projects which would have transformed the public beach into profitable real estate were enthusiastically supported by Santa Monica's leaders, but defeated by such Gold Coast residents as press magnate William Randolph Hearst and Hollywood's leading mogul, Louis B. Mayer, with help from friends in downtown Los Angeles and the State Assembly.

Pier Attracts a New Crowd

Though the Pier lost much business to Disneyland, it remained popular with residents, sightseers, fishermen, teenagers and beach aficionados. It also began attracting motorcycle gangs and Beats up from Venice.
   When the carousel operator offered the eccentric rooms overlooking the merry-go-round for rent, they were immediately filled by painters, writers and mavericks of several kinds. Novelist William Saroyan was among the early tenants. Contrary to pier legend, Joan Baez wasn't; her manager was. Their parties were frequent, wild and memorable.
   City leaders were disturbed at the old pier's renaissance as a kind of renegades' redoubt, Their distress was compounded when a couple of regulars at Muscle Beach just south of the pier were arrested on morals charges. The City Council immediately shut down Muscle Beach, but it didn't know what to do about the Pier.

Abstract Art on The Merry-Go-Round

In 1953, Waiter Hopps, the mercurial, magical champion of modern art in L.A., staged the first important exhibit of West Coast contemporary art, an eccentric mix of abstract expressionism and found-object assemblages, in the merry-go-round. Hopps wrapped the merry-go-round itself in a cylinder of heavy canvas and hung paintings on it. Tapes of contemporary, improvisational jazz put together by Hopps played non-stop.
   The exhibition, "Action I" was particularly significant, as some L.A. City Council members and L.A. county supervisors had publicly condemned abstract art as "communistic" and forced the removal of allegedly suspect paintings and sculpture from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and several other public sites. However disturbed they may have been by the presence of allegedly subversive art in Santa Monica, city leaders were powerless to break the carousel operator's deals with either his upstairs tenants or Hopps.

Santa Monica Enters L.A. Orbit

The opening of the Santa Monica freeway in 1961 instantly pulled Santa Monica into the Los Angeles orbit, making the beaches accessible to poor people in flight from the heat of the plains of Los Angeles and the city itself attractive to young and often liberal filmmakers, lawyers, teachers, architects, social workers and 1960s political activists.
   The people who lived and worked in the merry-go-round and ate and drank at Al's Kitchen, several doors west of the merry-go-round, liked the pier because it was dangerous in the way that everything on the line where oceans meet land is dangerous, and it was the real thing, not a tricked up replica, and well out of the way of what passed for progress there and then. It also had vast and unencumbered views of the ocean, sky, coast and mountains and strong, lucid light and was itself a kind of maverick.
   Everything the artists, bohos, Beats, beach bums and teen-agers liked about the Pier, city leaders deplored. Several times, during Newcomb's 20-year run, they conjured schemes which would have axed the pier or buried it deep inside some more profitable and respectable development. Each time they were foiled. However, a fire in the merry-go-round in the mid-1960s finally gave them an excuse to evict its residential tenants.

Council Votes to Demolish Pier

At the conclusion of Newcomb's lease in 1973, the City Council voted to demolish both the Newcomb Pier and the Municipal Pier and replace them with an elaborate man-made island with hotels, restaurants and a convention hall.
   For the first time in history, Santa Monica residents organized to oppose a decision by city leaders. The regulars at Al's Kitchen—the artists, bohos and rebels—began the counterattack and were immediately joined by a large number of residents in a campaign to save the pier.
   Joan Crown, the Englishwoman who owned Al's, mortgaged and then sold her house to underwrite the Save Our Piers Forever campaign. One of her waiters, Jack Sikking, became its principal spokesperson. "The Sting" was shooting in and around the merry-go-round at the time and the film's stars, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and virtually the every member of the crew signed the Save Our Piers Forever petitions. Buttons, bumper stickers and posters appeared everywhere. A television commercial was prepared.

Young Activists vs. Old Guard

The Pier partisans prevailed. Clearly, it was no longer business as usual in "the Zenith City by the Sundown Sea." Everything was suddenly in motion. Having saved the Pier, a group of young activists and old radicals decided to challenge the old guard for control of the city itself. As rents were rising rapidly and 70% of the voters were renters, rent control became the insurgents' principal issue and Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights (SMRR) was founded.
   In 1979, SMRR won two seats on the City Council, passed a rent control initiative and took all the seats on the new Rent Control Board. In the next election, in 1981, SMRR won four more places on the Council and took control of City Hall.
   Outraged conservatives hung sardonic banners at freeway exits that read "Welcome to the People's Republic of Santa Monica." New York's Village Voice dubbed the old beach time "the most radical city in America."
   In a sad irony, Al's Kitchen, where the movement to save the Pier began, is gone. Crown sold it in the late 70s. Unaware of or uninterested in its proud history, the new owners changed its name to Jack's. About 10 years later, the City demolished the building which, like all the other buildings on the Pier, it owned, citing its rotted substructure.

New Leaders Target Pier

Santa Monica was prosperous and in its prime, and the SMRR theorists set out to perfect it. Supremely self confident, they saw Santa Monica as the ideal laboratory in which to test and apply all of their theories— from community services to urban planning. As it happened, their first tests were conducted on the Santa Monica Pier, which had existed in a state of benign neglect since voters vetoed its demolition in 1973.
   Seeking to bring residents into the process, the SMRR Council members created the Pier Task Force. It included two pier tenants, a pier concession operator, an architect, several planners and SMRR activists, along with city residents. Over 250 people met with the Task Force and city staff in three workshops between April and July, 1982. Jim Burns, a San Francisco community design consultant, organized and led the workshops, during which guidelines for the restoration of the pier were developed with "as high a degree of agreement as possible about what should happen." (their emphasis)
   Workshop participants were encouraged to dream out loud and sketch their dreams on large sheets of butcher paper which had been pinned up on the walls of the meeting room. They also engaged in "Pierplay," a game that was meant "to help (them) reach agreements on what should happen and how it will work economically." Finally, participants ranked possible pier elements by preference.

(To Be Continued)

Note: I spent a lot of time in the ‘80s and early '90s on the Pier, producing events and doing promotion for, variously, the City, the PRC and the Santa Monica Pier Lessees' Association, as well as assembling an archive and shooting a film. P.C.