A pier is a folly, a highway to nowhere. Whether lined with fishermen or filled with the cries and clattering of a roller coaster, whether thick with the aromas of hotdogs and fries or freshly gutted fish, they are there for nothing but the pleasure of humanity.” —Henry Shukman, “A Sail Without a Sail,” Piers of the California Coast.
Before there was Disneyland or any other theme park, there were amusement piers. They offered an escape from the mundane: magic, fantasy, and thrills. It’s true that the glamor was illusion—the cheap and garish rhinestone variety, the magic was smoke and mirrors, and the fantasy often made of canvas, papier-mâché, and gold paint, but the thrills were real and laced with a dash of genuine danger—there were no safety requirements and the sky was the limit.
Southern California, built on a romantic and mostly fictional image of a golden land where riches abounded, was the perfect fertile ground for pleasure piers, and they sprang up along the Santa Monica Bay in profusion.
Pleasure piers are a distinctly Victorian invention. They grew out of the fad for visiting the seaside for one’s health popularized by King George III (yes, that King George) in the late eighteenth century.
Simply sitting in the sun or bathing in sea water for one’s health wasn’t sufficiently diverting for this first generation of recreational beachgoers. They wanted entertainment. Piers and boardwalks were built as promenades, so the “ton” could show off their stylish clothes and socialize while partaking of the healthful sea air. Then amenities began to spring up: food vendors and booths selling trinkets and sweets, and diversions that included horse races, boxing matches, and peep shows. Dance pavilions soon became a popular attraction, along with those mechanical marvels, the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel.
By the mid nineteenth century, when railway travel put the coast in easy reach and the industrial revolution had helped create a middle class, the seaside boardwalks and piers became full time fun fairs that catered to summer visitors holidaying at the seashore.
Eugenius Birch, an architect and civil engineer, is credited with developing the British pleasure pier. He built fourteen, and gave them an exotic flair, with Oriental-flavored architecture and fairytale flourishes that was later imported to Los Angeles’ seaside attractions.
At the height of their popularity, British pleasure piers were miniature fantasy worlds, precariously perched on wooden piles over the ocean.
It was this tradition that inspired East Coast attractions like Coney Island and Atlantic Beach, but also California’s pleasure piers. They sprung up in profusion in the Santa Monica Bay. By the early 1920s, the beach that was the original attraction was almost entirely lost in a forest of timber and concrete piles.
Some piers were fairly modest. The Sunset Amusement Pier was just a ballroom built over the water. The Crystal Pier was home to a bathhouse. Santa Monica’s Pier began as a utilitarian structure built to pipe effluent away from the town and out into the deep water, before evolving into an amusement pier with its celebrated carousel and other rides. It was modest compared to some of its neighbors: ambitious seaside pleasure palaces that offered unimaginable thrills.
The current Venice Pier is a plain structure, but in 1905 Venice developer Abbot Kinney had a much grander plan. His pier was 1,600 feet long and was built as a key part of his “Venice of America” development. In many ways, Kinney’s development was a sort of predecessor to Disneyland, combining fantasy architecture, engineering, and a bit of magic.
Kinney transformed a stretch of wetlands into his vision of Venice Italy, with gondoliers punting gondolas along canals, and architecture inspired by that of Northern Italy. The pier was located at the mouth of the development and carried on the theme, with architecture that drew inspiration from the Italian Renaissance, including the grandly turreted Venice Auditorium, and the arched and tower-bedecked Venice Aquarium, and the Venice Plunge—an epic indoor saltwater swimming pool designed to resemble a Venetian palazzo. This grand facility boasted 1,500 dressing rooms and every luxury for visitors, and spared refined beachgoers the inconvenience of swimming in the cold, open ocean.
The pier also offered a spectacular dance hall, a shooting gallery, bowling alley and pool hall, restaurants, concessions, live performances, and a host of rides including a merry-go-round, Ferris wheel, “the Whip,” the “Joy Wheel,” “the Dipper” something called “Over the Falls,” and the “Thompson Scenic Railroad,” a rollercoaster built out over the ocean that featured artificial mountains, canyons, boulders, waterfalls, and plaster wildlife.
Diners could enjoy their food and the view from a ship-shaped restaurant, and vendors sold popcorn and peanuts and ice cream.
Alas for Abbot Kinney, his pleasure pier was repeatedly damaged by storms. Big waves on New Year’s Day 1914 caused $100,000 worth of damage. The pier reopened.
Almost from the start, the Venice Pier had competition. Fraser’s Million Dollar Pier, better known as the Ocean Park Pier, was developed in Santa Monica by Kinney’s business-partner-turned-competitor Alexander H. Fraser. He borrowed the name from the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but Fraser vowed that his pier would be bigger and better—the biggest amusement pier in the world.
Fraser’s Million Dollar Pier also had a scenic railroad: Grand Canyon Electric Railroad coaster. It ran on nearly a mile of track along the north side of the pier and offered a ride through “beautiful scenic canyons, all beside Mr. Pacific Ocean.” A volcano towered above the ride, spouting glowing red “lava” at night—an effect created using colored lights. That volcano, made of timber and canvas, reportedly blew away during Santa Ana winds in 1911.
Fraser’s pier also had a dance hall and a thousand-seat theater. There was a roller skating rink where patrons could try their luck gliding along on a patent type of ball-bearing skates. The Million Dollar Pier didn’t just have a funhouse, it had a fun town: Toonerville, dressed up to look like the old west and featured the “cave of fire”, “skiddo slide”, “falling floor” and “maze of delight.” The entry sign proclaimed, “10 cents, you’ll like it.”
A cheap, seemingly inexhaustible supply of lumber, brought in from Northern California and the Pacific Northwest on steam freighters fueled the construction of piers—and the miniature cities they supported, but that left these structures vulnerable to fire.
Fraser’s pier burned in 1912 in a conflagration so large it consumed 225 structures, according to the Los Angeles Times, and displaced 1,200 people. The fire was visible for miles and drew so many spectators that Martial Law was declared to help control the crowds. It burned again in 1915. This time the damage was limited to a dozen or so rides and attractions on the pier, but the damage was costly.
In 1920, it was the Abbott Kinney Pier that burned. Almost the entire pier was destroyed on December 20, 1920, a month after Kinney’s death.
The fire broke out in the dance hall, which was filled with revelers. Visitors were safely evacuated—news reports state that the band facilitated their orderly departure by playing military marches—but a firefighter was killed when a wall collapsed. Venice historian Jeffrey Stanton, author of Venice of America: Coney Island of the Pacific, writes, “Damages ran to a million dollars, with little of it insured. It was a bleak Christmas.”
A year later, a new, even more lavish amusement pier rose from the ashes. The Venice Amusement Pier opened on May 28, 1921. This wasn’t strictly a pier, it was more a complex of piers that supported a dance hall that could accommodate 800 couples, standard carnival rides like bumper cars, a “Whirligiig”, and three roller coasters, and a custom aerial ride called the “Flying Circus” that towered 65 feet above the pier and provided simulated flight for the passengers of eight “airplanes” attached by huge cables to a central tower. There was the nearly hundred-foot-tall “Dragon Slide” made of bamboo (splinters were a hazard); a fun house with a hall of mirrors and a mini rollercoaster; sideshows; vendors; gaming halls; concession stands; arcade games; and bandstands. Stanton writes that, “the owners made a point of emphasizing the word ‘fireproof’ in all of their advertising.”
In 1924, the Ocean Park pier burned again, taking neighboring Pickering’s Pier and Lick’s Dome Pier with it.
Each time the piers were damaged or destroyed, they were rebuilt, coming back with new attractions.The piers continued to evolve. New roller coasters replaced the old. The Venice Pier at various times included deep sea divers, a mule train through a coal mine, a zoo with monkeys, and a wax museum showcasing famous criminals.
At the Ocean Park and Lick Piers, visitors could ride a miniature auto speedway, “shoot the chutes,” slide down a lighthouse, and be thrilled on the “Giant Dipper” and “Hi-Boy” roller coasters.
The golden age of California’s amusement piers was short. Prohibition, established in 1920, had a chilling effect. In 1925, Venice was annexed by Los Angeles and suddenly subject to puritanical Blue Laws banning gambling and dancing on Sundays. That was a blow for the Venice Pier and the nearby Lick Pier, which lost business to Ocean Park. The Great Depression made a major impact on all of the piers. Jeffrey Staunton describes how the pier operators coped in his book Venice of America: Coney Island of the Pacific: “…with spending money becoming scarce and money for new attractions non-existent, amusement men resorted to promotions and celebrations to lure paying customers to Venice and Ocean Park.” Survival mode became the norm during the 1930s. Things would never be quite the same.
There was a dark side to the piers. Rides frequently caused injuries and a number of extremely gruesome deaths. There were few labor or safety laws to protect visitors or employees and none to protect the animals used in performances, like the monkeys that were sent up in hot air balloons from the Fraser Pier, or the piglets rolled down the pig slide at the Abbot Kinny Pier.
Gambling and gaming operations at the piers were constantly in the news. The district attorney and various litigants alleging the games were fixed, a “sure thing” for the house; the defendants arguing that the games were a matter of skill, not chance. There were robberies, assaults, allegations of alcohol smuggling and sales during the Prohibition years.
There were mundane problems, too. Maintenance was a constant issue: the salt spray corroded metal and rotted wood and canvas. During the lean years of the Depression, attractions closed and were often not replaced. WWII brought new challenges, including a shortage of young male workers, strictly enforced restrictions on nighttime operations and night lighting, and shortage of parts and equipment needed to keep the rides running.
The Venice Pier survived until just after WWII, and may have had the opportunity for another chance at prosperity in the post-war years, but the lease on the tidelands where the pier was situated ran out, and the county declined to renew it. The plan instead was to remove all of the piers and restore the beach to accommodate beachgoers rather than thrillseekers. Venice Beach had come full circle.
“It was a sad day, the end of an era when the pier closed at midnight on Saturday April 20, 1946,” writes Staunton. “While some of the rides were sold to other parks, the buildings, roller coaster, Dragon Slide, even the huge Flying Circus became scrap. While it took more than a year to demolish the pier, an arson fire set by some boys at the Bamboo Slide in May 1947, finished the job.”
Author Ray Bradbury lived in Venice during that time. The abandoned remains of the rollercoaster were the inspiration for his 1951 short story “The Fog Horn,” and Venice of the late 1940s is the setting for his novel Death is a Lonely Business. In it he writes, “Those were the days when the Venice pier was falling apart and dying in the sea and you could find there the bones of a vast dinosaur, the rollercoaster, being covered by the shifting tides…”
The Ocean Park Pier lasted longer. It experienced a brief Renaissance after Disneyland opened in 1955. It was rebuilt, renamed, and reopened in 1958 with new rides and attractions, and for a while it attracted even bigger crowds than those flocking to the Magic Kingdom, but that revival didn’t last for long. POP—Pacific Ocean Pacific—closed in 1967.
The Santa Monica Pier is the only survivor of the amusement pier boom in the Santa Monica Bay. It also had its ups and downs. During the 1930s, many of its attractions were sold off. The U.S. Army commandeered the end of the pier during WWII, and the grand La Monica Ballroom at the end of the pier that opened in 1924 was demolished in 1963 By the time the city of Santa Monica acquired the pier in 1974, it was in bad repair and scheduled to be demolished. Residents rallied, forming the organization Save Santa Monica Bay. The pier earned a reprieve, but its fate was still undecided. The Santa Monica Pier never burned, but it was badly damaged during the winter of 1983. Winter storms and powerful surf also damaged the Seal Beach, Huntington, Hermosa, and Malibu piers and almost completely destroyed the Paradise Cove Pier in Malibu.
The damage to the Santa Monica Pier was extensive—more than a third of the structure was destroyed. Repairs took a long time, but in 1996, Pacific Park opened, with its hypnotic new Ferris wheel, slides and roller coaster, and its old historic and beautiful carousel.
A summer evening there, with the lights reflecting on the water; the chatter of the crowds and the rumble of the roller coaster; the smell of popcorn, fish, creosote, and sea water is a quintessentially California beach experience.
Walk further out, and the thrill seekers and carnival attractions give way to earnest fishermen lining the rails with earnest gulls levitating in the air above them. The pier sways gently underfoot, as if one was one a ship. It’s a reminder that one is now standing on a fragile structure over an unpredictable ocean, but despite its vulnerabilities, this pier is a survivor: the last of the great Southern California amusement piers.
