Those who know the name of the...

Those who know the name of the official bird of Redondo Beach are hereby entitled to feather their own nests in perpetuity. Give up? You might as well, because the authorized avian of this beach city is none other than the Goodyear blimp, Eagle. It was so designated as an airborne shill promoting the city’s virtues before the 1984 Olympics.

But before the helium-filled airship--cleaner than a sea gull, rarer than a condor and as easily recognizable as a turkey--started drawing attention to the coastal community, there were other tourist attractions: a long-board surfer and gambling ships.

When Redondo Beach incorporated in 1892, it grew swiftly as a popular resort and as a working-class town with a busy lumber industry. But its vulnerability to severe storms ultimately destroyed the dream of becoming the site of the area’s major port. A federal committee chose San Pedro, not Redondo, around the turn of the century, and soon all the shipping headed there.

So the city turned to tourism. In 1907, Pacific Electric Railway developer Henry Huntington hired a Hawaiian teenager to hang 10 off the coast, and soon visitors, who had never seen such a spectacle, were flocking to see George Freeth, billed as “the man who can walk on water.”

The stream of eager citizens and tourists lured to Redondo’s two miles of coastline continued through the 1930s, when throngs of patrons were consumed with gambling fever. Glittering gambling ships docked three miles offshore while bingo parlors and gambling outlets lined the amusement zone on the wild, bawdy and sin-saturated waterfront.

In 1935, the waterborne gaming palace Monte Carlo was held up by six men armed with automatic weapons who “chained up the crew and robbed the passengers of $35,000 in cash.”

Another famous floating casino, the Rex, moved to Redondo in May 1938 and set off a boom at the pier. To accommodate the increased business, 100 feet was added to the pier and a waiting room was set up for the 1,500 customers that came at night for the 25-cent water taxi ride to the Rex.

Redondo’s colorful gambling saga ended when Congress outlawed offshore gaming in 1946, and the 6.2-square-mile community began to grow into two distinct cities divided by 190th Street.

Wide, curving streets are characteristic of south Redondo, a planned community that grew up at the turn of the century along the water’s edge. By contrast, north Redondo remained largely rural until the 1950s, when homes sprouted, typically with smaller lots on narrower streets than in the southern half.

But it was the arrival of TRW Space Park, one of the world’s largest builders of unmanned spacecraft, in 1962, and of the official city bird two decades later, that thrust Redondo Beach into aviation history.

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Redondo Beach Tidbits

* Pier Delight: Resilient Redondo Beach, which has built seven piers off its shore only to have them crash into to the sea during storms, opened its rebuilt horseshoe pier last year. Pier visitors walk among etched, life-size images of jellyfish, dolphins, whales and scuba divers, all part of the $11-million pier project.

* Lyrical Virtue: Songwriter Peter Hume took the generic approach in 1984 when he wrote the contest-winning song “Redondo Beach: For a Day or a Lifetime” without mentioning the pier.

* Fame: A decade before he became famous, Detroit-born aviator Charles Lindbergh attended Redondo Beach High for one semester during a brief stopover in the area by his family.

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By The Numbers

City Business

Incorporated: April 29, 1892

Area in square miles: 6.35

Number of parks: 12

City employees: 164

1995-96 budget: $55 million

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People

Population: 60,167

Households: 26,804

Average household size: 2.24

Median age: 32.9

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Ethnic Breakdown

Asian: 7%

Black / Other: 2%

Latino: 11%

White: 80%

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Money and Work

Median household income: $52,044

Median household income / L.A. County: $34,965

Median home value: $347,900

Employed workers (16 and older): 40,378

Percentage of women employed: 73.1%

Percentage of men employed: 89.0%

Self-employed: 3,132

Car- poolers: 3,287

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Retail Stores

Number of stores: 738

Number of employees: 6,128

Annual sales: $625 million

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Families:

Married couples with children: 16%

Married couples with no children: 26%

Non-family households: 47%

Other types of families: 11%

Source: Claritas Inc. Household expenses are averages for 1994. All other figures are for 1990. Percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number.