Los Angeles' Amusement Piers - A History

In Disney's California Adventure, the second gate at the Disneyland Resort, one can walk to the back of the park and experience Paradise Pier. It's themed to be a Victorian turn of the century seaside pier alongside a mythical coast of a California that never was. According to the land's backstory, a man name Gustav Tinkschmidt is the proprietor of the pier which he has built it up with midway games and a gigantic "wooden" roller coaster (it's actually steel painted to look like a turn of the century wooden coaster).

There's a Paradise Garden area with Boardwalk Pizza and Pasta and the Paradise Grill, both according to the backstory started by one Italian family who came over from Italy in the 1930s. They built the smaller Paradise Grill then expanded to Boardwalk Pizza where they could display their flag from the Kingdom of Italy (pre-Itlaian Social Republic).

This is what I love about Disney parks. This effort to tell a story with something like a pizza place, instead of just throwing up a small stucco building to shove food out of.

The look of the boardwalk takes queues from the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. The 1888 resort hotel with great white walls and brown roofs is a historic landmark, and another example of this turn of the century desire by some east coaster to come out west and build resorts where others of their ilk could come and spend their holiday time.

I've recently gotten into the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, which takes a look at the complicated role Atlantic City played during the prohibition era. The show's creators built a fantastic boardwalk set in Brooklyn to film the scenes taking place on the boardwalk, which has a Ritz hotel, a nightclub, a photography store, and a place where you can see babies in incubators!

So when I talk about the amusement piers of Los Angeles' past, these are the practical turn of the century piers that I've seen to form my opinion of what a turn of the century pier would have been all about.

Ocean Park Pier. Photo credit: LAPL

As you might remember from when I talked about the Seaports and Railroads of early Los Angeles, the first train to Santa Monica arrived in 1889. Abbot Kinney was the first to develop an amusement area in Santa Monica, buying the Ocean Park casino in 1891 and expanding it into a beach resort called Ocean Park. The Ocean Park Pier at the center of the resort was completed in 1898. You can see from the photos, it's much more like the circus-y pier of Boardwalk Empire than the cleaned up version Disney offers.

Going counterclockwise down the photo there's Princess Silver Star - Indian palm reader, something called Barc-a-roll for 10 cents, Souvenir and Gift Shop (a must), the Casino, the Ocean Park Pier Dome Theater with dancing, the Egyptian Ball Room, a popcorn stand, a Coca-Cola ad, the Casino Cafe. I take it back, it's exactly like Boardwalk Empire. No surprise Abbot Kinney was from New Jersey.

Santa Monica's Ocean Park soon had competition brewing down south in Long Beach. We've talked here before how the Spanish Empire's fear of pirate raids led them to build inland instead of right along the ports, which left a lot of beachfront property open for amusement purposes.

Charles I.D. Looff, who built the first carousel at Coney Island, moved out to California in 1910. The Pike at Long Beach had been built in 1902 with arcades and food stands and the like. Looff purchased property on The Pike and built a carousel.

He was then hired by Santa Monica who had decided to build their own municipal pier in competition with Kinney's. In 1916, they built a large hippodrome (greek for horse race stadium) to house a carousel, and a wooden roller coaster known as the Blue Streak Racer. They also built a ride called The Whip (thing of the new Mater's Junkyard Ride in Cars Land).

Blue Streak Racer to the left, Hippodrome to the right. Photo: LAPL

Looff also built amusement piers and carousels at Redondo Beach and Venice Pier as well as the Santa Monica Pier still in operation today. Ocean Park operated until 1957, though it was reopened as the Pacific Ocean Park which was designed to rival Disneyland. Here's a look at Ocean Park's roller coaster, High Boy, as well as a midget car ride.

Big Boy and a Midget Car Ride, Ocean Park. Photo: LAPL

The Long Beach Pike had it's own wooden roller coaster, the most famous being the Cyclone Racer which replaced the Jackrabbit Racer. If you've seen Abbot and Costello in Hollywood, they ride the famous Cyclone Racer in that movie.

While these early thrill rides were surely a lot of fun, they were also a bit unsafe. A trip to Disneyland now shows an extreme emphasis on rider safety, with height regulations and safety belt checks and lap bar checks and mechanical locks that can only be released once the ride is safely stopped. Not so much back in the day. On March 1, 1927, police investigation began after a young man fell 50 feet off the roller coaster into the ocean to his death.

A rider's decent. Photo credit: LAPL

I do love the old newspaper way of diagraming a story. The curlicue is a nice touch. John Lee O'Brien is the name of the 16 year old who feel out of his car. Of course, there are always varying accounts.

Still, these parks were fighters through accidents, Prohibition, the Depression and two World Wars. Anyone who's been to the Santa Monica pier recently can attest that they just don't draw the crowds to keep up with the Disneylands' and Six Flags' of the world. Of course, you can always go to the pier Disney built in the middle of Anaheim, on a mythical coast of the California that never was.