HUNTINGTON BEACH : A Glimpse at the Pier, Circa 1914

City officials on Friday gazed into the past through an old newspaper, a club membership roster and a list of pier dedication events contained in a time capsule recovered from the 1914 Huntington Beach Pier.

The focus of the ceremony, at the Waterfront Hilton at Huntington Beach, was a June 12, 1914, edition of the Huntington Beach News and a document of that era bearing the names of 16 Santa Ana Elks Lodge members.

Those and the disintegrated remains of a 1914 pier dedication ceremony program had been encased in a rusted tin time capsule that had been set in a concrete block of the pier, which has been demolished.

The documents prompted city and business leaders to reminisce about the former landmark and the history of Huntington Beach as they sought donations for the new pier now being built.

The city has earmarked $8.85-million in public grants for the pier reconstruction project, whose cost is estimated at $11.7 million. A private organization charged with raising the remaining funds is still $1.6-million shy of that goal, based on pledges it has reported.

“I trust the importance of this historic event escapes no one,” Mayor Peter M. Green told an audience of politicians, bureaucrats, business executives, news reporters and dignitaries.

Afterward, the ceremony was repeated for a public gathering.

“Seventy-seven years ago, (officials) left a message for us,” Green said. That message, he acknowledged, is a “rather hyperbolic” commemoration of the opening of the 1914 pier. The newspaper, for example, bore a headline declaring, “This City Has One of the Finest Concrete Piers in the World.” The accompanying article about the plans for the dedication ceremony consumed a third of the edition.

The concrete pier replaced the original Huntington Beach pier, a wooden structure that opened in 1904 and was destroyed by a storm eight years later. The second pier was closed after heavy storms in 1986.

Although the content of the time-capsule items are of negligible historical significance, the remarkably good condition of the documents is noteworthy, said Dennis McGuire, the Orange County Public Library archivist who removed and restored them.

McGuire, who opened the time capsule May 8, said it took more than four days to clean and restore the rust-stained papers.

“They were in much better shape than I had expected,” McGuire said.

He said he was not sure why the documents were so supple, but he speculated that the salty, humid ocean air may have played a role. “There’s no way they were protected from the environment,” he said.

After unveiling the capsule’s contents, officials displayed a large black buckled box that Green said will serve as a time capsule to be stored in the new pier. That structure is due to open next spring.

Upon examining the box, former Mayor Ron Shenkman remarked, “Anybody who looks at that thing and thinks it’s going to last 100 years believes in the tooth fairy.”