Tide Running Against Old Venice Pier

Plain as a hunk of concrete can be, the Venice Pier has always lacked the flair of its wooden, turn-of-the-century predecessor, which offered such eye-catchers as the Giant Dipper Roller Coaster, the Bamboo Dragon Slide and the galleon-shaped Ship Cafe.

Didn’t actress Sarah Bernhardt once personally compliment the Ship’s chef on his ragout of spring lamb? The Divine Sarah would have been hard-pressed to find that dish at the modern-day pier’s hamburger stand.

In fact, before the 1,200-foot-long structure was closed for safety reasons 15 months ago, its biggest attractions were a video arcade and a couple of pay telescopes--much to the surprise of tourists expecting a taste of offbeat Venice.

“They’d come out here and think they were going to see the guy juggling chain saws or something,” recalled lifeguard Jon Moryl. “They didn’t realize this was another side of Venice.”

What this side was, in the words of resident Frank Maddocks, was a “place where a family could bring the kids out, catch some fish and spend the whole day. It was a place where senior citizens could chat and look at the view.”

No more.

Closed after the discovery that chipping concrete was falling from its base, the 23-year-old fishing pier has been targeted for demolition by the city Department of Recreation and Parks.

Maddocks heads a group--Pier Pressure--trying to save the spot.

The county Department of Beaches and Harbors, which formerly operated the pier, turned it back to the city last October because, spokesman Larry Charness said, “The revenues were minimal and the liabilities tremendous.”

One daunting factor was the $3.26-million settlement paid by the county last year to a jogger struck and paralyzed by a 150-pound chunk of concrete that fell from the 68-year-old Manhattan Beach Pier.

While the cracked portions of the structure had to be wrapped in chain-link fencing and adjacent stretches of sand were fenced off, the Manhattan Beach Pier remains open.

The Venice Pier was similarly wrapped, but Joel Breitbart of Recreation and Parks said engineers have concluded that “nothing we can do would make it structurally sound, regardless of how much money we spent.”

Demolition doesn’t come cheap. It’s listed as a $500,000 item in the department’s capital improvements budget proposal.

Ironically, last month’s storm, which damaged the Huntington Beach and Redondo Beach piers, hardly mussed up the Venice Pier, located off Washington Boulevard.

“If it’s condemnable after surviving that storm, everything along the coast is condemnable,” said Mike Ballard, whose family ran a bait shop at the seaward end of the pier for 20 years.

Ballard calls the Venice Pier, with conscious irony, “The Pier That’s Still Standing.”

How could the 23-year-old structure fall into such disrepair while 60- and 70-year-old counterparts up and down the coast survive?

That’s the question asked by Jack Leighton, an investment management consultant who misses taking walks over the water. “There ought to be some sort of committee to investigate what went wrong,” he said, “and I’d like to be a part of it.”

Attempts to reach the pier’s designer, Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall, a Los Angeles-based architectural and engineering firm, over the last week were not successful.

However, Breitbart of Recreation and Parks says comparisons of piers are meaningless because the surf and climatic “conditions are different for each.”

The Venice Pier’s problems stem from water that seeped through its concrete, rusting the steel reinforcing bars inside and causing them to expand and pop out pieces of concrete.

Nevertheless, Ted Anvick, a structural engineer who is helping renovate the 77-year-old Santa Monica Pier, believes its Venice neighbor could be reinforced and strengthened too.

“There are techniques to prevent (concrete) corrosion,” he explained. “We know that the reinforcing steel can be coated with epoxy or galvanized (coated with zinc).”

Cathy Connelly, a public relations woman working without charge for Pier Pressure, was encouraged by Anvick’s appraisal.

She suggested renovating the pier, perhaps with the help of sponsors, a not unprecedented arrangement at the beach. County lifeguards drive trucks that bear the logo, “Nissan, Official Truck, Los Angeles County Beaches.”

Pier Pressure’s strategy is to work with City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, generate support with petition drives, and raise funds through the sale of T-shirts with a pier logo designed by cartoonist Ron Overmeyer.

“We’re still trying to determine what the people want,” Galanter spokesman Rick Ruiz said cautiously. (Recreation and Parks’ demolition request requires approval from the City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley.)

Local merchants are divided because the fishermen aren’t viewed as big spenders. Some residents complain about parking problems.

Ballard, the former pier concessionaire who now runs a shop on Washington Boulevard with his brother, Roy, said he gets telephone calls from fishermen as far away as Bakersfield wondering if the pier will reopen.

But he added: “I guess they (piers) aren’t the novelties they once were. They’re kind of like dinosaurs now.”

Half a century ago, the coast was swarming with playgrounds jutting into the sea.

Outlined in lights on the Santa Monica Pier, the Blue Streak Roller Coaster and La Monica Ballroom dazzled for miles around--both attractions gone now, along with 400 feet of the structure lost in the storms of 1983.

Farther south, the sounds of the Aragon Ballroom filled the night on the Ocean Park Pier, straddling the Venice-Santa Monica boundary. The “Playground of the West” faded in popularity in the 1950s, made a brief comeback as Pacific Ocean Park, and then shut down in 1968.

And, off Windward Avenue, there was the Venice Amusement Pier, a citadel of nuttiness built by Venice founder Abbott Kinney in 1906. It was torn down in 1947 as part of what officials called a “beach improvement project.”

Something was always happening on the old Venice Pier, be it beauty contests (Miss Beautiful Back, Miss Red Head, Queen of the Moose), boxing matches, marathon dancing (outlawed in rival Los Angeles) or ballroom dancing before a brass section generating enough wind to “drive a locomotive from Venice to Riverside.”

Diners at the luxurious Ship Cafe ranged from celebrities like Jack Dempsey and Charlie Chaplin to local mobster Albert Marco, who shot two men during a party there and had to take his meals at San Quentin for a while.

A storage tank suspended in the ocean beneath the Ship trapped fish that were then served minutes later. In those days, there were no signs warning that eating locally caught fish might be hazardous to your health.

Half a mile south of where the old pier stood--some pilings are still visible--a gate bars entrance to the doomed fishing pier.

“It’s kinda like a tomb in here,” said lifeguard Moryl, who still reports to his station inside the fence each day.

“We used to have a lot of regulars,” he said as he walked toward the seaward end, shells cracking under his thongs. “Some guys’d come out seven days a week. And they’d wear the same clothes seven days a week. You could recognize the fish stains.”

While city officials review the pier’s death penalty, intruders are quietly dismantling parts of it.

Wooden railings are missing. “Firewood,” Moryl said.

Most of the sinks in the restrooms are gone too. Why would anyone take sinks?

“Who knows?,” he said with a laugh. “It’s Venice.”

Guerrilla fishermen are apparently making night-time forays over the gate, too.

“Look, here’s a sand shark,” Moryl said, pointing to a piece of dried skin on the deck.

Meanwhile, a small stretch of the pier in front of the gate is still open, and strollers walk out on the concrete, perhaps from force of habit.

The other day, retired builder Jack Majek relaxed against the railing. “It’s a shame,” he said of the pier’s fate as he stared over the side. There was nothing below to see but sand.