Before Disneyland, before Universal Studios, even before...

Before Disneyland, before Universal Studios, even before the movies, Southern California went to play at the piers.

For many decades, Los Angeles County had five amusement piers, from the Santa Monica Pier--the only one now in existence--to the Pike in Long Beach. There were also piers with rides in Redondo Beach, Venice and Ocean Park.

In their heyday, everybody knew them, everybody went to them. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared while swimming off Lick’s Pier in Venice.

All had carousels, fun houses and roller coasters twisting above the sea; Lick’s had the Aragon Ballroom, where music from Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra floated on summer breezes and Lawrence Welk would later sign his first one-year contract.

During Prohibition, speak-easies and gambling parlors flourished on the piers. In the 1930s and 1940s, water taxis took patrons to ships moored three miles out to sea, where they featured games of chance legally outside U.S. limits.

One pier even took on Disneyland.

In 1958, three years after Disneyland opened, a group of investors threw open the gates of what was then L.A.’s ultimate amusement park. It was Pacific Ocean Park, generally referred to as POP.

The Ocean Park Pier had declined to become a run-down establishment until the joint $14-million venture by CBS and the Hollywood Turf Club. POP boasted an “Ocean Wonderland” theme, complete with Neptune’s Kingdom, diving bells, a Mystery Island train ride, and the Flight to Mars ride with a dizzying flash.

But around the turn of the century, on the Venice-Santa Monica boundary between Marine Street and Navy Court, Ocean Park Pier was the center of a concentration of midways, carnivals and pleasure piers.

Before L.A.’s coast began swarming with these boardwalk playgrounds, the Ocean Park Pier, billed as the “Playground of the West,” started as a dream of Abbot Kinney.

After East Coast dandies made him rich puffing Sweet Caporals cigarettes, Kinney came to Los Angeles in 1880 and began developing a seaside resort he called Ocean Park.

Buyers of Kinney’s $100 lots, 25 by 100 feet, were promised a daily sunset of “scarlet and gold.” By 1904, a golf course, racetrack, tennis club, bathhouse, country club and electric railway had been added to the community. So was a 1,250-foot pier, built over the town’s sewer outfall, from the end of Pier Avenue.

Then Kinney sold the Ocean Park Pier and set out to build his Venice of America on the marshy lands south of Ocean Park. This would be his most ambitious venture, a re-creation of the Italian city. He built the Venice Pier to compete with Ocean Park Pier. But while the Venice Pier did well, it did not outlast its northern competitor.

Ocean Park Pier was a survivor: It would be rebuilt and patched up many times after fierce storms and fires. Over the years it bore many names: the Horseshoe, the Million Dollar, the Pickering--after owner and showman Ernest Pickering--and eventually, again, Ocean Park Pier.

New competition arose in 1922, when Charles J. Lick, an Eastside brewery executive, built his own pier on the Venice side, exactly three feet south of Ocean Park Pier. Two years later, both piers were destroyed by fire and rebuilt.

In the decade after World War II, the once-lavish park deteriorated into a colorful mixture of drunks, addicts and Sunday beach-goers. Movie directors used the piers as background for photoplays of decay and loneliness.

In 1958, the men with the checkbooks stepped in. The rescuers paid for a face-lift, and the park reopened as POP. The two piers became the nucleus of Pacific Ocean Park. In the first year, it was visited by more than 2 million thrill-seekers.

Yet in less than 10 years, the inland amusement parks won out. At POP, Aladdin’s sword arm hung limp in the Flying Carpet ride and the diving bells leaked. The controlling interests filed for bankruptcy in 1967.

After that, its only visitors were vagrants and film companies. The final episode of the TV series “The Fugitive” was filmed there. The fugitive and the one-armed man struggle atop the giant airplane ride, and the killer falls to his death.

The pier met its own death not long afterward. It was razed in 1974 and the beach has been reclaimed for public use.