The Pier Reappears : For 121 years, the Ventura structure has undergone numerous repairs and rebuilding. Now, after four years of planning and reconstruction, the project may be completed as early as the end of the year. And things are different this time around.

The ocean humbles. This is particularly true where it meets the land.

Vast deep sheets of water glide toward shore, swell into waves, and, bumped up higher by the rising ocean floor, roll and crest and slam with a great break into the sand where we walk. On a really bad day, most things in the way get smashed.

Few structures are as basic as the ocean pier. Few things, however, take such a beating. High tide, low tide, winter and summer, whatever the ocean does, it does to the ocean pier.

The Ventura Pier, standing for 121 years, is its own museum of maritime punishment--batterings, eviscerations, vanishings. Natural things would simply happen.

A storm in 1877 took out decking and pilings. A storm in 1926 pushed high seas over the walkway, removed decking, sucked out pilings, and swept to sea--and death--George Proctor, the Ventura man who kept track of the pier’s use as a commercial shipping wharf. A storm in 1937 neatly removed 1,000 feet of decking and pilings--roughly two-thirds of the pier’s entire length. In the winter of 1949, it not only snowed in Ventura, but monster waves dug eight feet of sand away from the pilings below, threatening the stability of the structure.

Storms in 1969 that wiped out Ventura Harbor battered the pier. Winter storms in 1977 made easy victim of the structure, at this point further weakened by termites and dry-rot. And savage winter storms in 1986 sent 10-foot waves, each carrying tons of applied force, headlong into the structure, knocking out four pilings and forcing the closing of two-thirds of the pier.

For all this, the pier kept getting fixed, rebuilt, loved anew--all against the knowledge that on any day, at any hour, the ocean might go into some preposterous distemper, rise 20 feet, push a mile-long sheet of dark, swelled water down from San Miguel Island, and blow the thing away, tossing pilings that once were 70-foot Douglas fir trees from Oregon onto the Ventura beach like so many Popsicle sticks, kindling for giants.

It’s a new day.

Again.

The Ventura Pier is, after four years of planning and one of massive rebuilding, reaching the point of full restoration, due for completion as early as the close of this year.

But things are different this time. What sets this restoration apart from earlier rehab projects is the sheer $3.5-million scale of it. Repair work just wouldn’t do.

The pier--its entrance at the beach along with the restaurant, bait building and entire 1,958-foot length of decking and support members beneath--was stripped down to pilings that protruded from the water. And the thing got rebuilt to more exacting specifications while hewing, for historical purposes, to the original design of the pier.

The result is a totally reconstructed “new” pier that’s stronger than it’s been for decades--perhaps ever. Or, as Jim Ross, the pier’s design engineer, put it: “It’s fairly beefy. I mean, city firetrucks can go out on it.”

Magical Places

Ideally there would be no need for firetrucks.

Today’s Ventura Pier will be a safe and quiet promenade, a fishing deck, a place to feel happily lost--and that much closer to--not to mention 20 feet higher than--the great, mysterious ocean below.

Piers are magical places, that way. They achieve so much.

The great piers of Atlantic City forever defined, and set at a breathtaking distance, that kinky glittering Oz of a place.

Pier-like docks that “pave” Louisiana’s bayous are for so much more than getting to the fishing skiff: They put you on the water, offer a view down into dark still waters roiling with alien life. And then, just as quickly, they offer a view back to the shacks and stilt houses so thick with family life.

Every pier not only defines its place but comes with its own purpose, its own legacies. Ventura’s is no different.

It didn’t even start as a pier. Indeed, the drive for a pier in agricultural Ventura in the years leading to 1872 was anything but aesthetic or recreation-related. Instead, it would make for good business and link Ventura to its own surrounding region, not to mention the world.

The railroad was more than 16 years away. There were no cars, no roads as we know them; horse-drawn buggies and carts churned up choking dust in the dry months and broke axles in mud during winter rains. The city itself was locked in by the Ventura River to the north and Santa Clara to the south, both torrential during rains. The way most passengers and freight arrived in Ventura was by ship.

The ships, however, had to anchor offshore, with cargo and passengers alike undergoing precarious unloading to lighters, or small barges, that would transport cargo and people to the beach.

The newspaper of the day, The Ventura Signal, threw up its hands in an editorial appearing May 20, 1871: “Hundreds of people are passing within sight of us weekly, looking at the country and seeking homes, who never see nor hear of San Buenaventura and never will unless it is made possible for them to do so by affording them a landing. We verily believe that had there been a good wharf here two years ago, as there should have been, the population (here) would have been double what it now is; and instead of a steamer once in ten days, as is now the case, we would have had them almost daily. . . . Is it possible that the most flourishing town and region of country on the whole coast is to go still another year without a wharf?”

It got built, by private businessmen, the next year. It became Ventura’s window on the world. Construction boomed as schooners arrived with lumber from Northern California and the Pacific Northwest (one of the schooners, the 105-foot San Buenaventura, was built rather pronto on the beach east of the pier by Ventura businessmen James Daily and Owen Rodgers). Whatever wasn’t made locally poured in from ships unloading at the wharf: glass, hardware, shingles, coal, kerosene, furniture, toys, sugar, coffee, tea.

Quickly, Ventura farmers found markets for what they did produce, and produced in abundance: lemons, oranges, lima beans and more lima beans. Capt. Robert Sudden built a warehouse at the base of the wharf where farmers could store their goods before shipment on coast steamers such as the SS Santa Rosa and SS Kalorama.

Ranchers got in on the export trade too. Cattle, sheep and hogs were sent off to packinghouses in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (The hogs, curiously, were loaded from the pier’s deck down into the cargo hold via a steep chute, part of which passed over open water. The desperate among the hogs jumped the chute, however, taking the precipitous dive into a 20-foot-deep fate that held only marginally better promise than big-city abattoirs; in any event, these bacon torpedoes were retrieved by expectant deck hands bobbing nearby in a small boat.)

Soon, Ventura’s oil producers were shipping oil from the wharf--first in barrels, then by pipeline down the Santa Clara River Valley to holding tanks at the beach. Oil became export king by 1890, according to records compiled by a network of volunteers researching the pier’s history, and this success would inspire the Sespe Oil Co. to commission the world’s first oil tanker, the 160-foot “W. L. Hardison,” with a load capacity of 3,800 barrels.

The Signal’s prophecy was proving correct. The wharf--today the pier--put Ventura on the map.

But no one could predict the natural or man-made tragedies at or near the wharf, built initially at 1,200 feet in length by R. G. Salisbury, builder of Stearn’s Wharf in Santa Barbara.

The W. L. Hardison, after only one year of ferrying oil up and down the coast, caught fire while tied to the wharf. And while Ventura was rocked with spectacular explosions, the wharf was left relatively unscathed. The schooner Lucy Ann, for which Ann Street in Ventura takes its name, went aground in swells near the wharf in 1874. The steamships SS Kalorama and SS Crimea, each with their own Ventura street names, were both slammed onto Ventura beaches by spring storms in 1876 while attempting to negotiate approaches to the wharf.

Worst of all, however, was the day in December, 1914, when the SS Coos Bay docked at the wharf. Huge sea swells unexpectedly rolled in. The skipper tried to pull away from the wharf. But a swell caught the turning ship and sent it, stern first, through the wharf in one shot. The Coos Bay ended up on the beach, blasted to bits. The wharf, cut in two, stood in disuse for three years, until 1917, when it would be fixed and lengthened by 500 feet, to 1,700 feet.

It marked a slow transition of sorts. Ventura’s seminal wharf, by this time feeling stiff competition from railroads and the major shipping ports to the south and north, would send off its last commercial vessel, an oil barge, in 1936.

And so would come the locals, the residents, the sunbathers, the fishermen, anybody looking to get out over the water and look back. Or look down. Or drop a line. Or just plain get away. The tired wharf held that possibility then, just as the pier does today.

It simply needed patching, fixing, rebuilding.

The Engineering

The physical challenges to the pier have been the same all along. Today’s calculations for the Ventura Pier’s seaworthiness remain largely unchanged from state-of-the-art engineering for a wharf, circa 1872.

Not only is today’s pier a faithful restoration (if longer in length than the original), the logic behind its design remains the same. The first to acknowledge this was Marquita Ellias, who as project engineer for the city of Ventura managed the reconstruction. She points to the alignment of pilings that support the pier’s new deck.

They are in short parallel rows that start at the beach and go out into the deepening water. But look closely. As these rows go farther out, they turn perhaps 20 degrees, ending up at an angle to the shore; they appear to be angled toward the Channel Islands. This is to accommodate an eastward current called the West Window, which sweeps in toward Ventura beaches from waters off Santa Barbara. By standing directly into the current, the pier’s supports slice through the water with less resistance.

“The wharf company, when they built this thing, really thought it through,” Ellias says.

Ellias is a hands-on kind of construction manager. She and an associate donned wet suits and snorkels and took a surfboard as a makeshift “inspection platform” to physically assess the condition of all 500 pilings above the water level. They were seeking obvious damage, the first offender being a shipworm called Linoria, which eats wood so voraciously as to hollow the piers out.

To Ellias’ delight, only 92 of the piers needed replacing. Many of the older piers were of superior, denser wood, both she and design engineer Ross say; and any number of the piers had been doubled up or replaced through the years.

Still, Ellias is respectful of what she truly can’t know. From her budget she paid a diver $10,000 to inspect the pilings beneath the waterline, and no sooner did he proclaim one row fit to be redecked upon than two of the five pilings in that row fell over. “I did a forensic on those piles,” she says. “They were rotted out two feet below the mud line. My belief got a little shaken that day, it’s true. But he couldn’t have found that. So you make your best judgment.”

Other engineering quandaries:

* What to do with the “knobby knees,” or fat clusters of mussels that build up, ring-like, around the pilings at waterline. They add collective resistance, or drag, to ocean currents, presenting more strain on the overall pier structure and offsetting other efforts at keeping things streamlined. But to strip the pilings clear of them is to expose untreated wood to ocean water, marine bores and accelerated rot. Decision: The mussels are staying.

* Just how tough do you build a pier? Design engineer Ross is sobering on the point. “You design within a probability,” he says. “We designed this one to withstand a 100-year storm. Here’s the kind of water we’re talking about: A 50-year storm, the waves hit the stringers (beams atop the pilings supporting the decking). But in a 100-year storm, you’ve got waves that are 1 1/2 feet over the top of the decking, over the whole pier. That’s a lot of water and a lot of force.”

In past mishaps, the rising water would reach the top of the pilings, push up on a heavy cross beam called a pile cap, and lift it and the entire decking above it free. The great risk is in having that piling cap--a massive foot-thick beam--drop into the stormy ocean, where it would serve as a battering ram upon the vulnerable pilings, at that point a grove of swaying branchless trees stuck in the mud. With the piling caps set free and crashing about in the maze of pilings, the pier simply ruins itself.

A heavy extra cost in the pier’s reconstruction involved the fabrication of custom steel straps ($300 each) that bolt the caps firmly to the pilings. Other custom tie-down devices are incorporated into the pier as well, creating a maze of reinforcement so dense that joining all the beams became a boxed-in affair that required extra figuring.

“You put all those tie-down connectors in there to keep the thing from flying apart,” Ross says. “But we had so many it seemed there was not enough wood to drill through. It all worked out fine. But I know Marquita lost a lot of sleep over those connections.”

It is, in the end, a lot to connect: 1,320 tons of new wood (or enough lumber to fill 53 18-wheelers) and a mile of new pilings (to reinforce the six to eight miles already embedded into the mud). The decking alone is hammered into place with 120,000 deck spikes, or giant galvanized nails that are hand-set, pneumatically driven to within a half-inch, and then sledge-hammered by hand into place. As all piers, which are in constant swaying motion, those nail heads are already working their way up, needing another rap down.

Will Ross lose sleep over the pier’s seaworthiness?

“Well, if a 500-year storm were to come through,” he says, “we’ll have some pieces go and some that will stay. And, just like the 100-year storm, it doesn’t mean it’s that long from now. It could, you know, happen next year.”

Keeping to Schedule

Early 1994 had been the official opening date of the pier, though work is sufficiently ahead of schedule for a possible October opening.

Pilings for a new 5,000-square-foot restaurant (yet to be announced), situated alongside the pier at the beach, were driven in recent weeks. Completed but for finishing touches are the pier’s new bait shop, snack bar, restrooms and fish-cleaning facilities, not to mention the entire 1,958-foot length of the pier deck itself.

Aesthetically, the 1993-94 pier is restrained, conservative, respectful of its rather enormous tradition, and ultimately tasteful: Its modest buildings have copper roofing that already is showing patina, rich cedar siding that with luck will resist graffiti. The whole thing will be free of commercial honky-tonk. And a number of the historical facts contained in this story and assembled by the Pier Interpretive Project will be mounted in a series of 30 plaques along the length of the pier.

One key project, however--and certainly the most distinctive--awaits completion.

Near the far end of the pier is a 10-by-60-foot hole in the decking. Into that hole will be mounted an $80,000 sculpture by San Francisco artist Ned Kahn called “Wavespout” (see accompanying story). It is a spiral device that, driven by the force of the waves below, becomes a mechanical blowhole by sending a plume of water six to eight feet into the air. In doing so, “Wavespout” seeks to amplify the motion of the ocean and invite pier visitors to look down between the sculpture and the decking to the ocean below.

That would be a good thing, if not entirely new for dedicated pier-goers: to gaze into a marine world reached oddly by foot and to know full well that though it’s only 24 feet deep, it’s a protean green-blue universe jammed with white croaker, jacksmelt, surfperch, mussels, phytoplankton, rays, and the promise that everything, including one’s view when one looks up, will be just a bit different for it.