Pier Reconstruction Proceeds, But Pier Redevelopment Stalls 

Peggy Clifford

Mirror Editor

After the storms, 1983

Part III

   Work went forward on the reconstruction of the pier platform at a slightly faster pace than the redevelopment. Daniel Mann Johnson Mendenhall, the architectural engineers chosen by the city to design and superintend the reconstruction, presented its final design alternatives at a public hearing on March 16, 1985. The simplest alternative was chosen. It combined reinforced concrete piles and a waffle-like platform with timber decking throughout the reconstructed portions of the pier, several fishing platforms and provision for a lower deck at the west end if and when the pier's breakwater was ever rebuilt.
   At the hearing, the architects estimated that the reconstruction, including the exhaustive paperwork required by the City, would be completed by February 2, 1987. It was actually finished in April, 1990.

Pier Development Plan Finally Complete

   The long-awaited Santa Monica Pier Development Plan was finally released in December, 1987, and presented at a public hearing. By then, both O'Malley and Anderson, the PRC board's leading businessmen, and accountant Carlson and attorney Harding had left the board and Alschuler had left Santa Monica to become a bi-coastal consultant. Among his first clients was the City of Santa Monica.

The City Council tapped assistant city manager 

   John Jalili to replace Klschuler. A consummate pro, Jalili was as low-key as Alschuler had been high-profile. Giving itself a modest pat on the back in the introduction to its plan, the PRC said it had made some improvements on the pier, including the introduction of a small summer "Fun Zone" with a Ferris wheel adjacent to the Carousel, a vendor program and the "Twilight Dance Series," free Thursday night concerts every July and August. But "...the Corporation's primary efforts have been directed to the development program...(which) encompasses sit years of planning, research, analysis and refinement...The PRC believes that...(it) will produce in a few years' time a Pier that will be quickly embraced by the community it is there to serve, by the private enterprises which will have invested in the development, and by the City whose steady support over the years has made it all possible." 
   The irony was probably unintended, but the notion that the "community" and the "City" were different entities with different interests and needs was as accurate as it was ominous.

The City versus The Community

   The Council and City Hall staff had become "the City" - concrete, coherent, formidable, while the actual city had devolved into "the community" - amorphous, vague, passive.
   Clearly, the altered pier plan served the City not the community. The City needed money,- lots of it, so the community's Guidelines were ignored as the City set out to turn the cherished old landmark into a cash cow.
   The community's Guidelines mandated a total of 51,000 square feet of development: commercial and public. The City plan called for an additional 87,500 square feet of commercial development. The community had allocated 2,000 square feet to games for young children, and possibly a small Ferris wheel. The City added a 40,000 square-foot "Fun Zone" with "kiddy and thrill rides (including a large Ferris wheel and bumper cars), games and ancillary uses." The Guidelines allocated 23,400 square feet for additional cafes and shops; the City plan included a 40,000 square-foot "Central Plaza" to house new restaurants, cafes and shops. The Guidelines recommended many, small businesses, but the City opted to turn the principal elements in the redevelopment over to two primary developers.

City Fails To Meet Deadlines

   The City confidently predicted that Sinbad's new lessee, the Entry Park and new Billiards Building tenants, the Fun Zone and Central Plaza would all be in place by December, 1990, but a heavily revised version of the Plan was issued in the spring of 1990 which noted that while the Entry Park space had been rented, everything else was still in negotiation.
   As the Pier's redevelopment moved forward at a pace that would embarrass a snail, the cost of Pier operations continued to escalate. 1982 operating expenses were $540,600. For Fiscal Year 1986-87, the city budget estimated operating expenses at $1,692,000, including $777,000 for pier management and "administration - indirect."

New PRC Director Mends Fences

   In 1988, Markens resigned and was replaced by John Gilchrist, a Los Angeles designer and teacher of design who had headed the Miami Department of Development since the 1960s. Genial, easy-going, Gilchrist immediate1y impressed lessees with his showman's sense of what the Pier should be and his willingness to work with them on improving, enlarging and upgrading their City-owned premises.
   George Gordon, the owner-operator of the Playland Arcade since 1954 and the last commercial carousel operator, agreed to house his games in a temporary structure, while he built a new $1 million arcade on the old site. The Boathouse Restaurant added an enclosed deck on the beach. The City and the Crown & Anchor pub and SM Pier Seafoods shared the cost of restoring the exterior of the vintage Billiards building while the businesses financed interior remodeling. The City sought a third tenant for the building.

Work Begins on New West End Complex

   With the completion of the platform reconstruction in April, 1990, work began on the City's new $1 million complex on the west end platform. It would house Harbor Patrol offices, a tide station, restrooms, a revived Santa Monica Pier Bait and Tackle Shop and the 319-seat Santa Monica Pier Cafe, which the PRC had leased to Grand American Fare, owner-operator of a number of Southern California restaurants.
   Lease negotiations continued with Barnard for his proposed 699-seat restaurant-nightclub in Sinbads, KBL, Inc., the designated Central Plaza developer, and the new Fun Zone developer. The City estimated that its west end complex would be ready for occupancy in April, 1991, and everything else, except the Central Plaza, would be up and open by the spring of 1992.

Pier EIR Under Fire

   Nothing was finished by the spring of 1992 except the Pier Environmental Impact Report (EIR). There had been no public hearings on Pier development since 1987 when the original City/PRC development plan was unveiled, though the project had been radically altered several times. Critics of the EIR were numerous and vociferous, charging that the EIR was tardy, flawed, incomplete and inaccurate, consistently underplaying the multiple negative impacts of Pier redevelopment.
   Both the EIR and the much-vaunted City process came under fire during extended hearings before both the Planning Commission and City Council. There'd been inadequate public notice of changes in the plan and little or no opportunity for residents to participate in the planning, critics said, though drastic alterations and additions had been made. A roller coaster had been quietly slipped into the Fun Zone plan. Two full-service restaurants, with liquor licenses, and a total seating capacity of 500 had somehow morphed into five bar-restaurants with a total seating capacity of 1500. As proof of the EIR's inadequacies, critics pointed out that it estimated that though the redeveloped Pier would attract twice as many visitors as the old Pier did, it would need less than half the parking spaces it then had.

Planning Commission Approves Flawed EIR

   While planning commissioners were critical of both the PRC and the City for making drastic changes in the plan without public notice and some agreed with critics that the EIR was incomplete, skewed and inaccurate, the Commission nonetheless approved the EIR and the redevelopment plan it described after two stormy sessions.
   Though many people had been critical of the Fun Zone and other elements in the plan, no one had specifically criticized the Central Plaza, yet the PRC suddenly and unilaterally scrubbed it, citing the EIR's finding that impacts of traffic generated by the Fun Zone and the Central Plaza, though "mitigable" at the pier, would be "unmitigable" at seven downtown intersections.
   The elimination of the Central Plaza left the redeveloped pier without a centerpiece or focal point. In one quick stroke, the PRC had virtually gutted their own plan in order to save the Fun Zone, which it saw as its major money-maker and critics saw as the primary affront to the Guidelines.

Decision Appealed to Council

   The Planning Commission's approval was appealed by several residents, forcing the final decision on the Council. A passage in the PRC's Annual Report Fiscal Year 1991- 92 summed it up neatly: "The revised Pier EIR was submitted to the Planning Commission on February 5, 1992. At that meeting, many members of the community spoke in opposition to the Pier redevelopment program. A variety of issues were raised at that meeting, including noise from the rides, the size of the roller coaster and Ferris wheel and parking. As a. result of that meeting, Corporation staff worked with a community organizer to better inform the public about the actual project and to make sure that the full measure of community support that exists for the Pier plan was expressed at future meetings. At the February 26, 1992, Planning Commission meeting 40 members of the community including a strong contingent of youth from Kids' City spoke in favor of the Fun Zone."

City Salts Hearings

   The account was, at best, disingenuous. After the first Commission hearing, Some Council members ordered the PRC staff to hire old SMRR hand and Task Force chair Ernie Powell to lobby for the Fun Zone. "Kids' City" was a City-funded program for high school students, who were regularly trotted out to voice support for City programs. Since the Council's approval of the Pier plan and EIR was never in doubt, Powell's show was seen as a cynical and costly charade, and proof that the City would go to virtually any lengths to perpetuate the myth of participatory democracy in Santa Monica.
   The criticism of the Pier plan and the EIR did not bother the SMRR leaders nearly as much as the charge that their much-vaunted process had been sullied. PRC chair Goldway spoke briefly on behalf of the revised development plan and at length in defense of the process, insisting that the public had had countless opportunities during the plan's evolution to participate in and comment on it and that this was truly "the people's pier." At a subsequent hearing, before the state Coastal Commission, she went even further, claiming that there had been "500 hearings" on the restoration of the pier.
   The record shows otherwise. Two public hearings were held on the design alternatives for the reconstruction of the pier platform in 1985. One public hearing was held in 1987 to introduce the PRC's first development plan. There were no further public hearings until the round of Planning Commission and Council hearings on the EIR in 1992, by which time pier redevelopment was already underway.

City Doesn't Give an Inch

   Having spent ten years and millions of dollars developing the plan, the City/PRC was unwilling to give an inch to its critics, though, paradoxically, by dropping the 40,000 square-foot Central Plaza, it had altered its plan far more drastically than its harshest critics had attempted to do. Non-SMRR Council member Herb Katz and an aspiring non-SMRR Council candidate Tom Pyne, a Planning
Commissioner, demanded that the PRC bring a comprehensive new plan to the Commission and the Council within six months, noting the PRC/City had spent nine years planning the redevelopment of the pier and suddenly had no plan at all.
   Though it had abandoned the Pier Task Force Guidelines, the City/PRC reconstituted the Task Force process. Mullin, who'd remarried and was now Susan Maysels, took the lead, commissioning the original Task Force moderator and organizer, Jim Burns, to set up and conduct another series of workshops to design the suddenly empty midriff of the pier. In the best City tradition, the workshops were scheduled to begin after the Katz-Pyne deadline had passed and after the 1992 municipal elections.

New Fun Zone Developer Named

   When the previously selected developer, Fun Zone, Inc., a corporation which included Ron Risch, son-in-law of longtime pier lessee, Harold Kleinmnn, withdrew, the PKC immediately issued a new Request for Proposals, in which it increased the size of the Fun Zone site, again, from 50,000 to 70,000 square feet. Five proposals, including one from Risch and Kleinman, were received.
   Santa Monica Pier Amusements Venture I, a combine of Old Tucson Theme Park stockholders and the Ogden Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, was chosen. It characterized its proposed project as "a low-cost alternative to Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm."

Tempers Heat Up

   In the spring of 1992, rumors were as thick as June fog on the pier that the City was going to eliminate the PRC. The lessees lobbied strenuously for both the PRC and Gilchrist. However flawed it was, they said, the PRC was more efficient than the City, redevelopment was finally underway and Gilchrist, they said, was the only person who had a clear notion of what the Pier should be and was willing to work with them. Dump the PRC, if you must, they said, but keep Gilchrist.
Ultimately, a bizarre compromise was reached. The PRC would be retained, but its budget would be cut by 25%. Gilchrist would stay, but his salary would be cut by 25%, Maysels would be let go and the Pier would be moved out of the Community and Economic Development Department and into the new Resources Management Department, headed by Jeff Matthieu.

$1 Million Administration

   According to the City's 1991-1992 budget, city pier management cost $316,534, "administrative costs indirect" were $262,978, and the PRC was allocated $511,125, for a total of $1,090,337. In the 1992-1993 budget, city pier management costs rose to $326,332, indirect administration costs increased to $385,888, while the PRC budget dropped to $363,484, for a total of $1,075,704, or a net savings of $14,633. Two things are worth noting. First, though it claimed it was making cuts, the City had actually increased the City staff's portion of the $1 million-plus budget by $122,910. Second, the City was still spending over $1 million a year on pier administration.
   At the end of 1992, Maysels was still assistant director of the PRC and both she and the two other PRC staff members had received 4% raises, but Gilchrist's 25% salary cut held.

Ups and Downs on Pier

   Ironically, in the midst of the rancorous spring of 1992, the battered PRC presided over the completion of five of its major projects and the City's west end complex.
   Whatever kind of rough harmony had existed between the PRC, the City and the lessees through the decade of false starts, delays and deceits had worn very thin. Maysels' short-lived effort to evict pier vendors, the debate over the EIR, which the lessees knew was flawed, and the threatened demise of the PRC had all worked like acid on what was left of the patently false premise that the City, the PRC and the lessees were equal partners in and happy collaborators on the redevelopment of the pier.

"New" Santa Monica Pier Opens

   Nonetheless, on a sunny June afternoon, when Maysels, Goldway and Santa Monica's current mayor and onetime PRC board member Ken Genser, a SMRR leader, climbed into the pier's newly repainted electric run-about, they were all smiling, as they set out to officially open the "new" Santa Monica Pier.
   The Billiards building, one of Looff's original buildings, had been faithfully restored. The Boathouse had been redecorated and repainted and had a new enclosed deck on the beach. Midway down the pier, the new $1 million Playland Arcade's shiny new games were humming and beeping. Out on the west end, the City's new assemblage of stacked and angled cubes and rectangles topped by a graceful steel tower was finally open.
   The run-about stopped at each of the five sites. The remarks of Genser and Goldway were enthusiastic and, once or twice, inspired, and contained not so much as a coma of the roil that had overtaken the pier.

(To Be Continued)

Note: I spent much of 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.
PC.

Correction: In Part II, Santa Monica architect Herb Katz's name was inadvertently dropped from the list of original PRC directors. Our apologies. As noted in Part III, Katz subsequently became a City Councilman. was a member of the City Council .