Pier Restoration Begins In Carousel, Is Halted By A Pair of Savage Storms

Peggy Clifford

Mirror Editor

Part II

Pier Priorities Ranked

   The 250 participants in the 1982 Pier workshops ranked possible pier elements by preference.
   In the first rank were: 1) open space development, promenades, parks; 2) small cafes; 3) a pavilion; 4) a marine-historical museum; 5) the renovation and conversion of an old pier building, Sinbad’s, into a cabaret theater.
   The second rank included: 1) vendor stalls/pushcarts; 2) a bandstand; 3) a small Ferris wheel; 4) restrooms; 5) a gallery; 6) pier office/security; 7) a restaurant; 8) a ferry dock; 9) a family cafeteria.
   In the third rank were such things as an oyster bar, artists’ studios, a playground, a marine study center and diving school, small shops, a hostel, bookstore, nightclub, skating rink, family arcade and beer garden.
   Clearly, workshop participants sought a burnishing of the bones, what was left of Looff’s pleasure pier after decades of weather and neglect rather than a clever recapitulation or replication of it. Out of those old bones, they wanted to make a low-key, off-beat anchorage, a free zone on the western edge of the vast L.A. empire.

Pier Guidelines Set

Issued at the conclusion of the workshops, The Santa Monica Pier Guidelines seemed a nearly perfect process of participatory democracy: citizens working together with bureaucrats to redesign a cherished community resource. The Guidelines summary said, “People want the Pier to keep and renew its ‘unique flavor,’ enlivening, capitalizing on and adding to the good things that are there...This document, then, is a community-created tool for fashioning the future of the Santa Monica Pier. It is a true mandate of what should happen...Those who respond positively to (the guidelines) should discover a wellspring of community support and enthusiasm. Those who do not—who choose to violate these guidelines—will make things unnecessarily difficult for themselves, the City and the friends of Santa Monica Pier...
   “Santa Monica Pier is not a blank slate waiting to be filled in with anything that comes to mind. It is an organism that already has a very lively life of its own, one that is participated in by many people.    These Guidelines seek to join and enrich this life, not to replace it or fundamentally alter. The process for Santa Monica Pier must be accretive and enhancing... These park approaches and plastic environments are anathema. Large scale projects that would dwarf what is on the Pier are verboten. As the Pier is an organism with its own personality and qualities, people want it to grow naturally, not artificially, in its evolution toward the improved recreational-amusement-entertainment environment they desire...Most significantly, the rejuvenation of Santa Monica Pier will create—or re-create—an absolutely unique place on the Pacific Coast of the United States. There will not be another like it.”

Preservation Is the Key

   The reverence, the hope expressed in the Guidelines is striking—even now. They envisioned a pier of modest, quiet pleasures. Through neglect, not design, the old pleasure pier had become a skeleton of itself, and the workshop participants chose not to flesh it out, dress it up and make a show of it again, but rather to celebrate what it had become, refining and augmenting it a little.    As significant, they acknowledged that the gathering of long, tall timbers and lights at the end of Colorado Avenue in downtown Santa Monica was, after all, not land or sea or a combination of the two or even a bridge between the two, but simply a pier.
   Though it wasn’t clear at the time, residents and City leaders came out of the workshops with absolutely different views of what had happened. The residents believed that they had determined precisely how the pier would be restored, while the leaders saw the Guidelines as merely a point of departure.
   Having canceled the carousel operator's lease, the City took control, hired its own operator and, soon after the workshops, ordered the restoration of both the building and the merry-go-round. At the same time, it invited architects to submit designs for a new Carousel Park which would latch the east end of the pier to Ocean Front Walk.
   A brother-sister team was rung in from Connecticut to restore the merry-go-round. Tracy and Steve Chapman disassembled the works—every horse, each joint and tie, and then remade, polished, oiled, sanded and painted them and put them back together again.    While the Chapmans remade the merry-go-round, a crew of carpenters, electricians, plumbers, masons and painters restored the structure itself.
   Moore, Rubell and Yudell, headed by Charles Moore, then one of America's leading architects, and Campbell and Campbell, top landscape architects, were chosen to collaborate on the park, which was to be underwritten by an interest-free loan from the State Coastal Conservancy.

Storm Sinks Pier's West End

On the night of January 27, 1983, a deep, fast storm boiled up out of the southwest, riding on a radically high tide and driven by the infamous El Nino, and hammered the pier hard. By morning, hundreds of people had gathered on the palisade above the pier and on the beach, About 7:30 a.m., the northwest section of the double decked west end platform and the two-story harbormaster's office buckled, broke off and sank into the rolling seas in one quick, remarkably smooth motion.
   Running loose in the raging surf, pier debris worked like battering rams on what was left of the Pier, slamming into pilings ceaselessly.    When the storm ended, City crews set about to secure what was left of the Pier and begin repairs. A giant crane rolled out on the truncated west end extension to drive new piles into the ocean floor.

Second Storm Rips At Pier

   On March 1, 1983, with seas were running full again, a second and more lethal storm hit the Pier, tearing away what was left of the west end and taking 45,000 square feet out of the southeast corner of the deck.
   Businesses, cars, stores, the crane - whatever was there went into the sea. Some old pier hands claimed that the crane did more damage than the storm, arguing that its great weight weakened the already weakened west extension and that it took much of the pier with it as it went into the water during the storm. City workers naturally disagreed.
   Following the storm, mountains of broken timbers and miscellaneous debris washed up on the beaches adjacent to the pier. Almost immediately, two different people began boxing bits of pier timber in plastic and selling them. In an ensuing wrangle over "rights," the city named one of the two, a school teacher, as its "official" vendor in return for a percentage of her sales.

Battered Pier Reopens

   Radically diminished, reduced in size by one-third, its wilder parts sunk, along with five businesses, the pier was open and operating only 48 hours after the storm spun out. City officials vowed immediately to reconstruct the Pier to its original size as well as restoring it.
   No one knew where the money would come from, but, as Mayor Ruth Goldway said, the pier was "the symbol and soul of the city. It gives us a sense of history and tradition that a city needs for its stability and sense of place." Neglected for decades, then battered and broken by the storms, the old Pier was suddenly burdened with extraordinary expectations.
   In fact, before SMRR's rise, Santa Monica was, if anything, excessively stable, its sense of place was so complete that, until the freeway rolled in, it had managed to remain immune to both the glories and grinds of Los Angeles, and, for better or worse, SMRR itself had upset both city history and tradition. Whether Goldway's elevation of the ragtag pier to community soul was an act of hubris, expedience or sentiment, the Pier became the principal focus of City Hall's energy.

New City Manager Takes Charge of Pier

   The SMRR-dominated Council had recruited John Alschuler, assistant city manager of Hartford, to serve a Santa Monica's city manager. Soon after the storms, he noted that he and his staff were spending half of their time on plans for the restoration and reconstruction of the Pier.
   Santa Monica divided along classic lines over the future of the Pier. Representing the deposed business community, The Chamber of Commerce favored turning the pier over to a master lessee who would finance the reconstruction, redevelop the pier and operate it, while SMRR leaders and many residents agreed with Goldway that the City should reconstruct and restore the Pier itself.

Pier Restoration Corp. Created

   In this, as in most things, Alschuler, a handsome man who combined impeccable progressive credential with a showman's flair, effected a compromise that inevitably looked better on paper than it worked, recommending that a non-profit, public benefit agency, the Santa Monica Pier Restoration Corporation (PRC), be created to oversee the reconstruction, redevelop the pier and operate it for the City, to insure, as Council member Dennis Zane said, that the pier would never become " Disneyland-by-the-sea."
   According to the guidelines, prior to the storms, the pier's 22 businesses produced a net profit of $67,000 in 1979, $84,900 in 1981 and $114,200 in 1982” (no figures were given for 1980). The <Guidelines’ “Existing Operating Assumptions 1982," posited that even after the city added an "administrative charge...not a Pier direct expense" of $200,000, the Pier would still generate a profit of $285,000.
   The guidelines recommended that 18,600 square feet be assigned to restaurants, 4,800 to shops, 2,000 to amusements, i3,600 to public space and 12,000 to miscellaneous uses and estimated that all the recommended renovations of existing structures and the pier itself, new buildings and utility lines and landscaping and a parking structure adjacent to the pier would cost $7.8 million.

Rehab Costly, But Feasible

   With an anticipated $1 million interest-free loan from the Coastal Conservancy, a possible $2 million in state and federal grants and $1.1 million in already allocated city funds, the restoration, as outlined in the guidelines, seemed as feasible as it was desirable. Reconstruction of the Pier to its original footprint was pegged at $10 million, of which $7 million would come from federal and state agencies, so it, too, was within reach.
   During the summer of 1983, Alschuler ordered a Community Needs Assessment Survey. 60% of the 798 respondents ranked the waterfront and beach as "very important" to them, while 27% said the Pier was "very important." The waterfront and beach and the Pier were the only city properties that respondents rated "very important."
   77% said they used the pier and 46% rated it as "excellent or good." Taken after the storms and before the restoration, the survey showed that the pier not only had hosts of partisans, but a large number of satisfied users. This show of support for the Pier as it was suggested that the guidelines' low-key, small-scale restoration accurately reflected community sentiments.

PRC Takes Charge of Pier

   Several city departments - General Services, Parks and Recreation and Community and Economic Development - had previously shared pier management and maintenance tasks. Alschuler designed the PRC to simplify and streamline management. The PRC would be located on the Pier, would manage it and its reconstruction and restoration and would be run by a board of directors comprised of business leaders, real estate developers and community activists in order to bring the requisite expertise as well as community sentiment to the undertaking.
   The Council named the first PRC board: David O'Malley, then CEO of Welton Beckett, a major Southern California design and development firm, and a pal of Alschuler's, chair; Judy Abdo, a community organizer and SMRR stalwart; David Anderson, CEO of GTE; Henry Custis, a teacher and Pier Task Force member; Goldway, who'd lost her Council seat in an astonishing upset in the April, 1983, municipal election; attorney Chris Harding; former Task Force chair Ernie Powell; Task Force member Mary Houha Powers; real estate developer William Spurgin; and economic consultant Wayne Wilson.
   One of the new board's first acts was to hire Gail Markens, who'd worked on New York City's Southport development, as PRC Executive Director, and Susan Mullin, former Pier manager, as PRC Leasing Manager. Judith Meister, a City Hall staffer, was named Pier Reconstruction Manager for the City.

City Gets Low Marks as Landlord

   Since the imposition of rent control, the City's assault on landlords for real or imagined violations had been quick, regular and thorough, but the City's performance as Pier landlord got low marks from the lessees. In 1973, following the city's take-over of the pier, lessees had tried and failed to get what they considered reasonable long-term leases from the City. Following the storms, they tried again, seeking leases that would carry them through the period of reconstruction and redevelopment and assure them of continuing places on the restored pier.
   In September, 1983, Mark Tigan, Director of the City's Community and Economic Development department, presented the lessees with a draft lease for their consideration. The lessees' lawyer criticized the draft's "adversarial language" and the refusal of the City to give lessees either the "security" or "incentive" to make capital improvements on their businesses during the proposed three-year term of the lease. Other flaws noted by the lawyer in the draft lease included the city's unwillingness to commit itself to the preservation or maintenance of the pier, its sharply increased rental rates, its requirement that lessees agree to pay an unspecified sum for the maintenance of an unspecified amount of public space, and its prohibition of a lessee "receiving the benefits from the sale or transfer of his or her business."
   The lessees rejected the draft lease and for the next decade made few capital improvements as most of them were on month-to-month leases.

Pier Loses Businesses

   Shortly after the PRC moved into its new offices overlooking the merry-go-round in the restored Carousel, three lessees were evicted: The Shooting Gallery, Skipper's, a snack stand in the Carousel, and Moby's Dock, a restaurant and bar on the west end of the pleasure pier. In each instance, the lessee claimed that the City had bullied him, while the City claimed that the lessee had violated the terms of his agreement.
   In 1952, there had been 22 businesses on the Pier. Five were lost in the storms, three were evicted, leaving 14: two restaurants, four fast food cafes, a fish market, a palm reader, two games arcades and three retail shops. Still, the Pier continued to be the city's most popular and visible attraction, drawing upwards of 2 million visitors annually.
   The PRC's first Annual Report, for fiscal year '84-'85, outlined an ambitious and wide-ranging scenario for the year ahead, but it also suggested a seismic shift in direction.
   The report said, "The Corporation is charged with redeveloping and restoring the Pier and returning it to fiscal good health, without diminishing its character. The principal criteria at this time are the Pier Guidelines... At the time (the Guidelines were prepared), no one knew how large the Pier's operating losses were, and the Pier had not suffered any storm damage. After the 1983 storms destroyed five businesses and nearly one-third of the deck, and more sophisticated accounting procedures showed the true annual deficit, it became necessary to think in both more imaginative and more pragmatic ways about the Pier's restoration...Preliminary results of a financial feasibility analysis show that in order to make the Guidelines economically viable, a higher density of development and a greater percentage of food and possibly retail uses will have to be considered...(and) the ratio of amusement space to retail space may have to be adjusted...it has already been determined that cars must be removed from the Pier in order to accommodate additional shops, restaurants, amusements and additional public space.

Juggling The Numbers

   "Preliminary financial feasibility analyses show that, in 1985 dollars, the complete restoration will cost close to $40 million, with $4 million for the commercial area, $15 million for a parking structure, and $7 million for the public areas. The public areas include $12.3 million for Pier reconstruction, $1.2 million for open space improvements and $1.5 million for the last stages of the renovation of the Carousel and construction of the Entry Park."
The PRC never defined what it meant by "more sophisticated accounting procedures," though they not only listed what appeared to be profits in 19G1 and 1982 as "operating losses," but quadrupled the cost of the pier's restoration and multiplied the cost of the parking structure by six.
   In one stroke, the PRC and the City dumped the Task Force's Guidelines, on economic grounds.

PRC Loses Power

   In addition to stating its intention to redevelop rather than simply restore the pier, the PRC report also noted a diminution in its own authority. Initially, the Corporation was "to restore, maintain and operate the Santa Monica Pier." But its service agreement with the city only "authorize(d) the Corporation to proceed with both lease management and plans for the redevelopment of the Pier and to continue to serve the City in an advisory capacity on maintenance, security and capital construction projects." Before it had even been tested, the notion of a citizens' board controlling a community resource had been killed and the became an expensive layer in the city bureaucracy.
   Pier power remained in City Hall, which inevitably added to the costs of redevelopment and slowed it down. The operating budget for the PRC for FY '84 -'85 was $231,886. In addition to Markens and Mullin, it employed a staff assistant and Elaine Mutchnik, whose province was events and promotion coordination. Though they were employed by the PRC, they reported to the City Manager.
   City staff regularly double-teamed the PRC staff and board, reviewing every proposed PRC plan, project and policy and, often, radically revising or rejecting them. Not surprisingly, the PRC failed to achieve any of the goals set in its Annual Report.

Pier Mantra: Over Budget, Behind Schedule

   The renovation of the carousel and the construction of Carousel, aka Entry, Park ran behind schedule and over budget. Construction of the park was supposed to cost $380,000 and be completed by the fall of 1983. It actually cost $1 million and wasn't finished until 1986.
   The new Fisherman's Restaurant, which was supposed to open in 1986 on the old Moby's Dock site, never materialized. Requests for Proposals (RFPs) were to be issued for the old Sinbad's building and 4,000 square feet of retail space in the new park in 1985. The PRC didn't begin lease negotiations for Sinbads until 1989 and in 1993, the City condemned and demolished the old landmark. The new retail space remained unfinished and empty until 1989 when the PRC leased it for a token rent to the non-profit West Side Arts Center.
   According to the PRC report, existing commercial buildings were to be "rehabilitated this year and next year (1985 and 1986)," but, beyond a few coats of paint and new signs, little rehab work was done. Lessees were unwilling to undertake capital improvements without leases and the City, which owns all the buildings on the pier, never got around to it.
   As a result, in addition to Sinbad's, four existing buildings on the Pier were condemned as unsafe and demolished by the City, further reducing the number of businesses and attractions on the pier.

Parking Structure in Limbo

   The '84 - '85 PRC Report said, "...feasibility and design analyses (on a new parking plan and/or structure) will be undertaken this year and an environmental impact report will be undertaken next year, with final design and bond issue to follow. Construction of a new parking structure could be completed in a year. Once the cars are off the pier, construction of new commercial and public space could begin immediately."
   City and PRC staffs struggled for several years over off-pier parking plans, but could never agree. The absence of a plan slowed both planning and lease negotiations down markedly as potential lessees wanted some guarantee of continuing and convenient access to the Pier via automobile prior to committing themselves. Though the parking structure site was owned by the city and the parking structure was included in a 1992 Pier Environmental Impact Report, along with several alternative plans, no decision was ever made and no design work was ever done. In 1992, the theoretical car park was quietly dropped from redevelopment plans.

Unmet Goals Mount

   The PRC also stated its intention to prepare an overall use and development plan, including leasing and site plans, conceptual design guidelines for the redevelopment and restoration of the pier, a general operations plan and a "merchandising concept" which would "describe in general terms the requisite new businesses, establish price levels and categories of merchandise, services and/or amusements, and thus define the overall character of the restored pier. Working with the staff and board on the development of the merchandising concept will be a small team of consultants with expertise in food, amusements, finance and design."
   It took the PRC three years to produce the plan and it saw the Pier as neither the soul of the city, a community resource or even a pier, but rather as a mega-development whose character would be contained entirely in its wares.

(To Be Continued)

Note: I spent much of the '80s and the 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. PC