‘Hermosa does have a history and we want people to know about it.’

Whenever Patricia Gazin walks into the Hermosa Beach Historical Society Museum, she runs into an old friend. They’re the big, heavy block letters that used to spell out C-I-T-Y H-A-L-L on the circa 1913 municipal building that was demolished more than 30 years ago.

“I rescued them in 1959 when the building was torn down,” said Gazin, an historical society leader who kept the artifacts in her back yard for three decades until they were put on display in the museum.

A number of other people have rescued--or at least held onto--bits and pieces of Hermosa Beach’s history and it fills one big room at the Community Center, which is itself a slice of the past. The complex, built in 1927, used to be a junior high school, an animal that no longer exists in a town of so few children.

With its photographs, maps, yellowing newspapers, vintage street signs and official-looking documents, the museum tells the story of tiny (1.3 square miles) Hermosa from its turn-of-the century birth as a collection of getaway beach shacks to its evolution into a sun-tanned, high-density beach community where yuppies and free spirits vie for space amid rising land values.

“Hermosa does have a history and we want people to know about it,” said Jeanette Carr, historical society president. Among other things, she said, Hermosa Beach once had a thriving silk industry and helped the 1920s roar with bootlegging and gambling. During the 1960s, it was a Bohemia of flower children.

There used to be an aquarium on the beach where one Winnie the Whale--very much deceased--was on display. “It smelled of formaldehyde,” Carr said.

The museum opened on a regular basis in March, welcoming visitors Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Gazin--a local historian and former city councilwoman--serves as a guide full of tidbits about Hermosa’s past.

Among them: Hermosa had five houses in 1903 and the first downtown was a post office and grocery at the corner of Pier and Hermosa avenues. People from Pasadena built getaway shacks on the sand and moved them on skids away from the tides, Gazin said.

Museum visitors, most of them from surrounding beach cities, are invited to find themselves in old high school class photos, framed and faded, that hang on the museum walls.

Browsing through the museum, visitors encounter an uprooted wooden railroad crossing and piece of track, a memory of the old Santa Fe Railroad right of way that used to run between Valley Drive and Ardmore Avenue. A big photograph of the Pier-Hermosa intersection looking toward the pier shows the heart of downtown in the days when the Model A was king and there was angle parking in the middle of the street. A 1938 menu from Hank and Perry’s Drive-In advertises dinner for 45 cents.

A new museum addition is a collection of vintage postcards--the kind with pastel hues that don’t quite look like photos. The views include a crowded beach in front of the old Hermosa Biltmore Hotel--a once-luxurious city landmark that ended up a hippie crash pad in the 1960s--and a residential neighborhood with more vacant lots than houses, a site not seen in Hermosa for years.

The museum also contains a special tribute to the late Jim Milbank, who pioneered the practice of sifting sand for valuables during the 1930s when he was a city maintenance man. His booty included watches, pocketknives, necklaces, cigarette lighters and a few whistles.

Since it was formed in 1987 as a volunteer organization, the historical society has been collecting the city’s past, and Gazin said donations or gifts of new material are welcome.

“Our volunteers are enthusiastic about keeping the museum open,” she said. “There’s a great deal of interest in local history because people need a sense of identity.”

Carr calls the museum “an opportunity to see how much we’ve changed and how much we haven’t.”

What: Hermosa Beach Historical Society Museum.

Where: Hermosa Beach Community Center Room 7, 710 Pier Ave., Hermosa Beach.

When: Saturday-Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.

Admission: Free; donations invited.

Information: 318-9421.