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LIVING HISTORY - A WALKING TOUR OF THE SANTA MONICA PIER

By Jodi Summers

Real Estate Broker/Owner with Sotheby's International Realty

November 17, 2013 10:42 PM

by Jodi Summers

The world loves the Santa Monica Pier. It’s top 10 in popularity for Instagram locations. The view of the Pier from the balcony is one of the many selling points for the new multimillion dollar Waverly and Seychelle condos at the Village @ Santa Monica. We enjoy the Santa Monica Pier in many ways for many reasons. Next time you walk down the Pier, put on your goggles and duster, and travel back in time to a different millennium…the Santa Monica Pier is laden with local lore and savory history….start at the top and work your way to the end….

According to the Los Angeles Times, the first passenger train reached Santa Monica in January 1889. Entertainment entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. Abbot Kinney, a gentleman from a well-to-do New Brunswick,New Jersey family, became interested in land development along the Los Angeles coast. In 1891 Kinney and his partner Francis Ryan bought controlling interest in the Ocean Park Casino and the surrounding tract of land.
They built a beach resort called Ocean Park. Ocean Park Pier in the center of their resort at Pier Avenue opened in 1898.

1. THE SANTA MONICA PIER - Noticing the success of the Ocean Park Pier, the City of Santa Monica got the vision of doing a municipal pier. After 16 months of construction, on September 9, 1909, the Santa Monica Municipal Pier opened to the public. (The City wrote it into the budget by making its primary use to carry sewer pipes beyond the breakers.) The 1,600-foot-long wooden pier unfurled before you opened with festivities and gala hoopla that included band concerts, swimming races and the novelty of walking above the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Clean and austere, the pier had no amenities.

2. THE SANTAMONICA PIER SIGN – In 1940, a new bridge to the Pier was constructed. During the grade project, the road down the Pier was cut off from traffic, and business suffered. The Pier’s business community installed the iconic arched blue neon sign to re-confirm the Pier’s location and access to motor traffic. The city-designated historic landmark and registered trademark frequently appears in movies and TV shows.

3. The LOOFF HIPPODROME - Opened in June, 1916 on what was then called the Looff Pleasure Pier, the Santa Monica Looff Hippodrome is located on what is now known as the Newcomb Pier, adjacent to the Santa Monica Pier. The Hippodrome is a nationally landmarked structure that might best be described as “a California-Byzantine-Moorish-style fantasy” that sits at the shore end of Santa Monica Pier. This unique structure has been home to a succession of vintage merry-go-rounds and Wurlitzer organs. Back in the early days, the hippodrome was accompanied by the Blue Streak Racer wooden roller coaster and the Whip and Aeroscope thrill rides.

A success on the East Coast amusement scene, Looff moved to Long Beach in 1911 to focus on the West Coast amusement movement. He was aware of the Santa Monica Pier’s success, and in 1916 reached an agreement with the City of Santa Monica to purchase the northern 200 feet of beachfront property for $50,000 to build a pier alongside the Municipal Pier.

It has been reported that Looff chose Santa Monica to build his amusement pier because, "the bathing beach at Santa Monica is well-known as one of the finest on the Pacific Coast, it attracts the highest class of people, and
transportation facilities afforded are unequaled."

Looff, the man responsible for the hippodrome, is one of this country’s most noted carousel builders. His legacy is the innovations he made to the carousel horse. The moving horses were slender and graceful and inferred motion. The manes featured "cut through" openings, which looked dramatic, but where very time consuming to carve. Around 1905, Looff designed a saddle that resembled a scoop, a design that is still found on carousel horses today.

The hippodrome currently houses the 1922 PHILADELPHIA TOBOGGAN COMPANY CAROUSEL with 44 hand-carved horses and a Wurlitzer band organ.

4. If you notice, there is a yellow beam connecting the two piers that make up the Santa Monica Pier. The Municipal Pier was built in 1909 to carry a pipeline for disposal of treated sewage out to the ocean - a practice that ended in the 1920s. It became two piers when Charles Looff built the wider “pleasure pier” along the south side for his amusement park.

5. THE BOWLING & BILLIARD BUILDING (1917), now houses Piazza Al Mare and Rusty’s Surf Ranch. The surf broke beneath this building until 1933, when the addition of the breakwater changed the currents, inadvertently creating the super-wide beaches for which Santa Monica is now famous.

6. In popular folklore, ROUTE 66 stops or starts here—depending on whether you’re heading west or east—2,448 miles from Chicago. In reality, the official terminus is at Olympic and Lincoln boulevards, but since that’s a freeway intersection, this is a safer location.

7. PLAYLAND ARCADE opened in 1950 and is the Pier’s longest-running enterprise, still owned and managed by the family that started it.

Gone but not forgotten…SINBAD’S (1955-73) was housed in a bright-red building that once defined the Pier’s profile. Built next to The Bowling & Billiards Building, it opened in 1918 as a banquet hall. It was moved next to THE LA MONICA BALLROOM in 1925, and ultimately became legend as Sinbad’s.

More than 50,000 people attended the July 23, 1924 grand opening of the La Monica Ballroom, enough to cause the first traffic jam recorded in Santa Monica History. The LaMonica boasted a 15,000-square-foot maple dance floor and drew thousands of dancers and celebrity orchestras until the Depression ended its reign. In 1948, Spade Cooley, a country swing music star, televised his weekly TV show in the ballroom, making that the first time that a musical show was televised live. The grand ballroom became a roller skating rink in 1958. Due to overuse and exposure to the elements the ballroom was showing its age when it was demolished in 1963.

6. PACIFIC PARK has been in operation at the Pier since 1996 -, the first full-scale amusement park on Santa Monica Pier since the 1930s. The park looks directly out on the Pacific Ocean, in the direction of Catalina Island. It is the only amusement park on the West Coast of the United States located on a pier. There are a total of thirteen rides in Pacific Park, including the world's only solar powered Ferris wheel and a roller coaster that circles the majority of the park.

In 1974, the City acquired ownership of the adjacent privately owned pier, and saved both structures from demolition. In the 1980s the pier was almost destroyed by winter storms. In 1983 the city formed a Pier Restoration and Development Task Force (now the Pier Restoration Corporation), with the goal of returning the pier to its former glory.

In 1989 the Pier Restoration Corporation elected to "make the pier a year-round commercial development with amusement rides, gift shops, nightclubs with live entertainment and restaurants" that would be "reminiscent of its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s". The 2-acre Pacific Park opened in 1996 as a full-scale family amusement park.

7. THE YACHT HARBOR – is under water. Do you notice how the Santa Monica Pier sign says yacht harbor on it, yet there is not a yacht or a mooring in site? That dream began in the 1920s, when entrepreneurs like retired sailor named Olaf C. Olsen created fleets of recreational fishing boats. Olsen was a local hero, fought to keep large-scale commercial net fishing out of the bay, and during the Great Depression legend has it donated part of his own catch to needy families. All the locals knew Olsen and admired him. One pier visitor, Elzie C. Segar – the author of a popular comic strip called Thimble Theater - met Olsen, and he inspired him. He created the cartoon character Popeye after Olsen.

In 1933 a bond issue was passed allowing the city to build a breakwater and create a yacht harbor so boats could be safely moored and to also protect the pier. Construction on the breakwater was completed on July 30, 1934, just in time for the highly publicized Santa Monica Regatta. A collection of yachts, including Charlie Chaplin’s, as well as fishing boats and a cruise liner to Catalina made the yacht harbor their home base.

Unfortunately the breakwater was poorly engineered and began to sink into the sandy ocean bottom and is now almost completely submerged. When Marina del Rey, then the worlds' largest man-made pleasure boat harbor, opened in 1965 just a few miles south of the pier, it signaled the end of boating activities at the Santa Monica Pier.

8. Paddle boarding was imported to Santa Monica from the Hawaiian Islands in the 1930s. Inside the safe protection of the harbor paddleboard racing thrived. Two clubs, the Santa Monica Paddle Board Club and the Manoa Paddleboard Club called the Pier their home. The sports thrived until the 1950s, whencompetitive surfing become the favorite. The recently re inaugurated annual PADDLEBOARD RACE AND OCEAN FESTIVAL commemorates the Pier’s long connection to ocean sports and lifeguarding.

9. THE FISHING DECK - The Santa Monica Pier has long been a favorite among the fishing community. People have great stories about fishing on the Santa Monica Pier – not just the folktales of the 500 pounders that got away (referring to the giant black sea bass which were once prominent in the area).

Teenagers tell tales of fishing at night along with a number of Chinese fishermen who made a regular habit of snagging crabs with large treble hooks. They kept a fire going under a large pot filled with seawater. As they caught a crab it went into the pot and it became a sort of communal crab feast.

When this pier, like many, was damaged by the 1983 storms, its future was debated, debated, and finally debated some more before the $30,000,000 renovation was begun. On April 5, 1990, one phase of the work was finished and a reconstructed Municipal Pier celebrated its rebirth. Today, the end of the pier has special sections designed for anglers and it is one of the most attractive piers in the state.

Drop a line you might catch the occasional 22-37" halibut, but "More common than halibut are white croaker (tom cod), queenfish (herring), sardines, walleye surfperch, salema, sargo, scorpionfish (sculpin), kelp bass (calico bass), sand bass, Pacific mackerel, jack mackerel (Spanish mackerel), and bonito (on live bait or bubbles with a feather). Occasionally, barracuda, white seabass or even yellowtail will show up - most often out at the end of the pier in deeper water."

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