SOUTH BAY / COVER STORY : Pillars of Their Communities : For South Bay’s piers, it’s a constant cycle of construction, destruction, reconstruction. More than merely walkways, they are a tie to cities’ pasts and a vision for their future.

We are perched on the westernmost side of the continent, at the very water’s edge, and yet somehow it still isn’t quite far enough.

So we build piers.

They jut from every South Bay beach town, from Manhattan to Hermosa to Redondo, fingers of wood or concrete reaching out to the sea. For more than a hundred years we have built them, enjoyed them, watched them get knocked down by waves or fires, and then built them up again. No matter how well-built they are, no matter how many tons of concrete or miles of reinforcing steel are put into them, someday the piers will crumble and topple, a victim of time and salt and pounding waves. But eventually, the piers will rise again. It’s a constant cycle of construction and destruction and reconstruction.

We’re in a reconstruction cycle now. New or newly renovated piers are busting out all over the South Bay.

In Redondo Beach, city officials are planning a January opening for the new Municipal Pier, nearly seven years after storms and a fire dumped much of the old horseshoe-shaped pier into the ocean. In Hermosa Beach, plans are being formulated to renovate that city’s 30-year-old fishing pier with new railings, beacons, a new snack shop and, maybe, a lighted neon tube running the pier’s entire 1,140-foot length. In Manhattan Beach, a restoration of that city’s 928-foot, 1920s-vintage concrete pier, including the Roundhouse at the end, was completed two years ago.

It’s an important process, this pier renewal, more important than simply providing platforms for fishermen or diners or strolling lovers. Because piers reflect as well as define the cities that they connect to the sea.

“In many ways a pier provides an identity for a community,” says James Crumpley, of Moffatt & Nichol Engineers in Long Beach, who has designed piers up and down the West Coast--including the Hermosa Beach Pier in the early 1960s. “Sometimes you can tell a lot about a community just by looking at its pier.”

That certainly is true in the South Bay. The graceful lines and stately light towers of the Manhattan Beach Pier suit the quiet, upscale, family-oriented city of Manhattan Beach--a town so traditionally staid that until the 1930s even men weren’t allowed to wear topless bathing suits on the beach. The spare, utilitarian look of the Hermosa Beach fishing pier likewise matches that city’s laid-back, unassuming style. Under reconstruction in Redondo Beach, the Municipal Pier, with its collection of arcades, fish restaurants and bikini shops, harks back to the days when Redondo Beach was one of the wildest, bawdiest, most sin-saturated waterfronts on the West Coast.

In short, piers are simultaneously a connection to the past and a vision for the future. And in the South Bay’s piers, you can see plenty of both.

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“The design life of this project is 50 years,” says City of Redondo Beach engineer Richard Becker as he watches construction workers wrestle another piece of the Municipal Pier into place. “But the actual life? Who knows? All we can do is build it as strong as we possibly can. We’d like to have it last a hundred years, but . . .”

Becker’s voice trails off, as if he really doesn’t want to be nailed down to a prediction. And who can blame him for not wanting to tempt the pier gods? After all, the recent history of the Redondo Beach pier has not been one of sunny good fortune.

Redondo is the granddaddy of South Bay pier communities. The first of its piers was built in 1889, when some entrepreneurs decided that the deep-water canyon lying just off Redondo Beach made it a natural place for a port--this at a time when the now mighty Port of Los Angeles on the other side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula was a mosquito-infested swamp.

Initially, the Redondo piers were strictly commercial ventures, not recreational ones. Until about 1912, ships bearing lumber and other goods offloaded at the three piers--also called wharves--that extended from Redondo’s beaches, with trains standing by to transport the goods inland. Thriving port-side businesses offered gambling and prostitution.

But eventually San Pedro won favor over Redondo as the site for a deep-water port, and Redondo’s piers began to be used more for fishing and recreation than maritime commerce.

By 1988 the Redondo Beach pier was an amalgamation of two old recreational piers--the Horseshoe Pier, built in 1926, and the Monstad Pier, built in 1928--with a “Fishing Promenade” built in 1983 connecting the two. Crammed with restaurants, an arcade and beach-style shops, the Redondo Beach pier was visited by about 4 million people a year.

And then multiple disasters struck.

In January, 1988, two storms battered the pier and ripped out 20 pilings. While repairs were under way, another storm in April wiped out the Fishing Promenade and damaged the Monstad section. Then in May, while workers were again frantically trying to repair the pier in time for the summer season, a fire broke out. Business owners, visitors and workers had to run for their lives as creosote-soaked timbers went up in black, oily smoke. When it was over, 34,000 square feet of the pier and 15 businesses had been destroyed.

“I was absolutely stunned,” remembers Jim Hall, a lifelong South Bay resident and now executive director of the Redondo Beach Pier Assn., which represents major leaseholders on the pier. “It was always just the place to go in Redondo Beach. It was an institution. But I was absolutely confident that it would rise again.”

But not everyone was so sure the pier would come back, or even if they wanted it to.

Some homeowners in the area were happy the pier was gone, and with it the crowds it attracted. Soon after the City Council promised to rebuild, squabbles erupted between pro-pier and anti-pier forces. Finally, in March, 1991, after months of rancorous debate, Redondo Beach voters approved the pier reconstruction. After more disagreements over the design, the $11-million reconstruction project, paid for with federal, state and local funds, was launched in July, 1993.

Instead of looking like a rickety old wooden barge, as the old pier did, the new concrete-decked pier will have a more seaworthy look, with wooden guardrails and lampposts resembling lighthouses and shade coverings resembling sails. Relief impressions of porpoises, seals and a 40-foot whale will be etched into the concrete deck.

On the practical side, the pier will also be five feet higher above the water--allowing storm waves to wash under instead of over the pier--and will be supported by more than 200 concrete pilings driven as far as 70 feet into the sand.

The public will have a chance to walk out on the new pier after the ribbon-cutting ceremony Jan. 22. But it will still be two or three years before the structures on top of the pier are completed.

What those structures will be remains a subject of debate. Last summer the largest leaseholder, Steve Shoemaker, announced he was putting his lease up for sale on the grounds that city officials wouldn’t let him put up an attraction such as a wax museum or an aquarium. City officials have said they would prefer something a little classier.

But after all the arguments are over, Redondo Beach, a city founded on piers, will once again have a pier to call its own.

“This is a lot more than just a pier,” Becker says. “It’s a fundamental part of this city’s history.”

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Whenever Wilmer Drake, 77, wants to recall the Manhattan Beach Pier of his youth, all he has to do is take a walk down Manhattan Beach Boulevard to the water’s edge. The pier is still there, looking just like it did oh so long ago.

“It’s just like it was back in the 1920s,” says Drake, a retired plumber who used to fish off the pier when he was a boy. And that’s just the way Drake and most other people in Manhattan Beach like it.

The first Manhattan Beach pier was built at the turn of the century. A wooden fishing pier, it was knocked down by a storm a few years later, and another wooden pier, made out of lashed-together railroad ties, was put up in its place. That pier, too, was soon knocked down by waves.

Manhattan Beach residents, obviously tired of having their piers knocked down so easily, in 1918 started building a state-of-the-art structure with concrete pilings and decking--the first steel-reinforced concrete pier on the West Coast. It was intended to be 1,500 feet long, but in 1920 the city ran out of money at 928 feet and decided to just leave it that length. In 1921 the distinctive “Roundhouse” building--actually an octagon--was built at the end to sell hot dogs and soft drinks.

It wasn’t the city’s only pier. Farther north, at 33rd Street, was Peck’s Pier, a wooden structure built in the early 1900s. In those days of segregation--which wasn’t confined to the Deep South--it was the only pier in Manhattan Beach that blacks were allowed to use. Eventually, a combination of storms and social justice rid the city of both the pier and its reason for existence. .

Meanwhile, the main Manhattan Beach Pier held on through countless storms and breaking waves for seven decades--an astonishing amount of time given the life expectancy of other open-ocean piers.

By the late 1980s, however, corrosion of some concrete pilings and the steel reinforcing rods in the deck made major repairs necessary. There were several proposals for changes, but the city decided not to change a thing.

“There was a lot of sentiment to keep the pier in its traditional configuration,” says Mike Daly, interim administrative services director for the city. After all, he added, “the pier is like our Statue of Liberty,” and who would presume to change the Statue of Liberty?

The $4.4-million restoration project, which included replacing the entire deck and rebuilding the Roundhouse, which contains a cafe and an aquarium/marine museum, was completed in 1992. The Roundhouse was rebuilt as it was in the 1920s, as were the globe-mounted light poles that line the pier.

True, some things change. For example, it’s more of a strollers’ pier than a fishing pier these days. Although there are still some fishermen, it is cappuccino, not fish bait, that’s in the hands of most people on the Manhattan Beach Pier these days. That’s partly because of changing demographics and partly because the fishing ain’t what it used to be.

“We used to catch halibut in abundance off the pier,” Drake remembers. “Caught barracuda and sea bass, too. But they hardly ever catch them anymore.”

Fishing prospects aside, Drake, like most people in Manhattan Beach, seems happy with the way the pier restoration turned out.

“I like it this way,” he says. “It’s good to have something just the way it was.”

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“They have cappuccino at the end of the Manhattan Beach Pier,” says Mary Rooney, assistant city manager of Hermosa Beach. “At the end of our pier we have fish guts.”

Rooney laughs as she talks about the divergent images of the two piers in the adjacent beachside communities. But it’s the sort of comment Hermosa residents make about their pier. They may love their pier, but they aren’t going to put on any airs about it. It’s a fishing pier. Always has been.

Hermosa Beach traces its pier history to 1904, to a wooden trestle that lasted only nine years before a storm knocked it down. The next pier, a 900-footer built in 1914, fared better, but was condemned as unsafe in 1957. The current pier, a 1,140-foot concrete-decked structure, was completed in 1965.

But that was almost three decades ago, and now, armed with $1.5 million in county special improvement funds, the city is looking at sprucing up the pier. Tentative plans call for expanding the plaza at the beach end of the pier, refurbishing the outside of the county lifeguard headquarters building, adding a cafe at the end and installing fishing platforms along the sides of the pier to give fishermen more room. Decorative changes would include putting in new lighting along the length of the pier, perhaps including a neon tube that would extend the length of the pier like a glowing guardrail.

The fishermen who use the pier aren’t too sure about the neon guardrail. But they like the fishing platform idea. At 20 feet wide, the Hermosa pier is narrower than most, and even though overhead casting is prohibited, when it’s crammed with strollers on weekends it’s almost too crowded to fish from.

“It’s a wonderful idea,” says Modesto Martin, 73, of Los Angeles, who’s been fishing off the Hermosa Beach pier almost every weekend for 16 years. “We need more room.”

It’s probably going to take a while. The plaza expansion phase of the $3.5-million project should be done by 1996, but the pier renovation will have to wait until the city finds more money. Eventually, though, Hermosa Beach officials assume the pier renovation project will be completed.

And if history is any indication, they’re probably right. Storms, fires, political squabbles and lack of money have been crashing against South Bay piers for more than a century. Yet somehow, those piers always get fixed.