Still Queen of the Pier : Closing Landmark Left Ella Angry, Also High and Dry

She is 74 and widowed and her life, for the past 37 years, has been spent on the Huntington Beach Pier, doling out advice and friendship each day with the coffee and beer.

To generations of fishermen, lifeguards, cops and beach-goers, Ella Christensen is fondly known as the Queen of the Pier--an ambassador for tourists, a grandmother and shrink to her customers, and a fixture on the landmark since 1951.

She is a beloved local legend who is as tough as she is tender. But lately: “I’m mad as a wet hen.”

The 5-foot-tall proprietress of the Neptune’s Locker pub, the Captain’s Galley sandwich diner and the Tackle Box bait shop has been abruptly put out of business.

With almost no notice, city officials on July 12 decreed the 74-year-old pier a danger to the public and closed it--and Ella’s three thriving shops. The 1,827-foot pier will be rebuilt in about three years, the city estimates, but Christensen doesn’t see much hope in that.

She is not only without her income but--perhaps more importantly--without a place that since her husband died in 1972 has provided her with camaraderie and a sense of purpose each day. So what will she do now?

“I don’t know,” she said this week, squirting bug repellent into her fly-infested beer tapper at Neptune’s. “I’m not going to sit around idle ‘cuz I’d die, and I’m hopin’ and hopin’ and hopin’ they’re gonna let me stay.”

Lifeguard Matt Karl peeked his head inside the 10-foot-wide bar and said, “I hope so, too.”

Ella finds questions about her future difficult to answer. In fact, she doesn’t even want to think or talk about it, cutting the conversation short with I-don’t-knows. She has no problem, however, with letting you know what she thinks of the city giving her “one hour and 15 minutes’ notice” that the pier would be closed indefinitely.

City Administrator Paul E. Cook said he had hoped one of his deputies would reach Christensen in person to inform her of the closure between noon and 1 p.m. on that now-historic Tuesday. She was informed, instead, by a newspaper reporter. Cook said his staff decided that “to tell her any earlier than that would have created a rush out to Ella’s for one more beer and create the dangerous situation we were concerned with.”

At Monday night’s City Council meeting, Ella expressed her views this way: “In all my life have I felt ever so hurt as to get the shaft. . . . In one hour and 15 minutes, all the dreams were shot . . . it was all over. . . . I don’t think it’s fair, Mr. Cook.”

An overflow crowd of people attending the meeting gave her a lengthy standing ovation, some of them wiping away tears. And the tirade she and several others unleashed, plus a proposal that would allow the pier to be reopened, may have bought Christensen a week or two more to hope for a change in her fate.

Before she hobbled to the podium with the aid of a walker, her customers had berated the City Council for leaving her high and dry. One of them suggested that the city bolster cross-beams at the inland end of the pier so that part of it could reopen.

Some downtown merchants say that closing the pier has resulted in a drop of up to 75% in business at the height of the summer season. Opening the pier from its inland end to the water line--about 300 feet--would mean Christensen’s diner and pub would be back in business. Both shops sit about 250 feet from the pier’s land base.

If the city would consider this and pay her electric bill, too, Christensen said she would donate half of her profits toward rebuilding the pier, a contribution she said that would be in the “thousands of dollars.”

Cook said there is no question that the repair can be done, but it remains to be seen how much the city is willing to spend to reopen the pier temporarily.

Even if it is reopened, Cook said, he and other city officials have made it clear to Christensen that they are offering her no guarantees or first options to operate pier concessions once the new $10-million pier is built within three years.

The city has offered to relocate Christensen in a trailer at the foot of the pier, but she would not be allowed to sell beer--an offer she rejected. The city also has promised to buy her inventory, compensate her for her perishables, even employ or find jobs for her workers, most of them teen-agers.

“I went to high school with her kids,” Community Services Director Max Bowman said. “So nobody is enjoying this.”

Some of her loyal customers think all of this is pretty awful, and they are meeting for companionship Saturday night and every Saturday after that on the sand at Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coat Highway, lifeguard tower No. 17, “in honor of Ella and . . . Neptune’s.”

How long all of this rallying behind the feisty pier institution will last remains to be seen, Christensen says. For now, she is taking it one day at a time.

On Wednesday, Christensen spent the morning reading newspaper stories about her predicament over breakfast, then went down to the city’s beachfront lifeguard headquarters for clearance to enter the gated-off pier. No problem, they said. Every lifeguard she encountered--there were a dozen--she greeted by name, with an “I miss you” exchanged.

“They’re like my grandkids,” she said.

It was her sixth trip into her stuffy shops since the pier closed, and slowly she was making some progress. Many of the faded pictures of the pier and the beach and the local baseball teams she had sponsored were gone. The leased color television and video game tables had been returned. She took home her jukebox for fear it would be stolen.

But moving everything seemed to be too final for her. The phone and electricity are still on, the refrigerators are still brimming with food and beverages. The 17 red vinyl-topped chairs that were made from pieces of old light poles remain, as do the wood countertops that were once hatch covers before Christensen and her husband, Carl, got them from the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

She smiled wistfully as she squirted more bug spray on the counters of Neptune’s.

In 1951, she and Carl moved to Huntington Beach from their Akron, Colo., farm because doctors had told him that the farm work would eventually kill him. The couple opened the Tackle Box that year near the pier’s end. About 17 years later, they had opened the sandwich counter and the pub. Carl died soon after that, Christensen said, pointing him out in a picture.

“There was no other man like him,” she said softly.

Only two weeks ago, she was rising before dawn and opening up her shops by 5:45 a.m., sharing a cup of coffee with the “joggers, bike riders, strollers, ordinary people, fishermen, photographers, surfers, swimmers, leetle ones and big ones.”

She admits that she misses the daily stream of people, “especially the children. They all know about my Cookie Monster (cookie jar), and that I’ve always got a cookie for them out here.”

Loyal friends say she always had pocket change to give children trying to call their parents from the public telephones outside Neptune’s. And she has made more personal loans to down-and-out pub patrons than she ever got back.

“She’s hired a couple of generations of local kids to sell bait and flip hamburgers, knows everybody, and keeps proceedings on an even keel out here,” author Jean Femling wrote in her book, “Great Piers of California.”

Some of her regular fans dropped in before she had packed some things into her maroon station wagon. “I don’t want to be quoted or anything,” one lifeguard said. His friend nodded. “I’m just here as a friend.” Like any other business day, she offered them a cold drink, which they declined. Both men bid Christensen goodby.

“Take care, ya guys. I miss ya,” she said.

“We miss you, too.”

Then she drove away.