With Pier Open Again, Santa Barbara Relaxes

This seaside city is home to the Calamity Jane of wharves. Built in 1872, Stearns Wharf has recovered from three fires and four killer storms, has been held hostage by anti-oil protesters and has twice become obsolete.

But Santa Barbara loves its wharf and so do visitors. Nothing, not even the November 1998 fire that damaged one-third of the wharf and destroyed three businesses, could completely shut it down.

Just in time for summer, Stearns Wharf--well, most of it--is open again. Eighteen months after the fire, 420 feet of decking that faces the sea at the far end of the wooden structure has been rebuilt. Traditional timber pilings have been replaced with steel. Two restaurants and a bait shop leveled by the fire await an August completion.

“I love this place,” said Tonya Sayle, who moved from Nantucket Island in Massachusetts to Santa Barbara five years ago. She sat on a bench outside the marine museum, flanked by two small boys she cares for during the day.

“It’s peaceful and beautiful and I’m glad it’s finally fixed,” she said, doling out graham crackers to her companions. “It reminds me of home, only warmer.”

Although the 1998 fire closed only the back portion of the structure, the noise and confusion of rebuilding have kept many people away. Within days of the fire, inspectors reopened the front portion of the 2,300-foot wharf and devotees trickled back.

But since the wharf’s full four acres reopened May 27, balmy weather and the start of summer have brought visitors by the thousands.

“We get about 2 million people out here every year,” said John Bridley, waterfront director for the city.

On a recent sunny weekday, they came. Walking, driving, pushing baby carriages and wheelchairs, they scattered to every corner of the wharf. Love-struck couples strolled hand in hand.

Boisterous groups of teenagers, identical outfits implying a strict, unspoken dress code, crowded the food stands. A trio of perfectly preserved 1931 Ford sedans, gleaming in the sun, rolled sedately across the wooden pier. A hulking Ford Excursion followed close behind, dwarfing its dainty ancestors.

Gulls and pelicans wafted like kites in the air overhead; a pair of great blue herons groomed each other on a spit of beach below.

Cesar Rico, who has lived in the city for 11 of his 19 years, relaxed on a shady bench in the newly opened portion of the wharf. His wife, Javiera, who expects their first child this month, looked quietly out to sea.

“People come to Santa Barbara from all over and they all know about the wharf,” Rico said. “It makes the city more special, gives you a place to relax, look around, think about things. It’s got history to it, you know? And that’s important.”

Important, yes, but a bit hard to find for visitors strolling the pier. Plaques along the entrance to the wharf start off with warnings: no high heels, no diving, no skateboards. They segue to Chumash history, information about whales, how beaches are formed and what creates the tides.

But there is little information about the pier itself.

“It’s that old--128 years?” asked an astonished Asa Blomberg, a 24-year-old Swedish tourist. She had walked the length of the wharf with her sister, Lisa, and both seemed unimpressed.

“It’s too commercialized; it feels like it is there just for the tourists,” she said. “To know the history, that would be more interesting. Did we miss the signs?”

Yes and no.

A plaque about the wharf, located next to the venerable Moby Dick’s restaurant, went up in flames in 1998 along with the eatery. A display of a load of lumber on a small flatbed next to the marine museum gives a hint of Stearns Wharf’s beginnings, but few hard facts.

No way to know that, before the wharf was built, seafaring visitors to Santa Barbara reached shore on the backs of sailors who, without a generous tip, would reliably “trip” in the surf to dunk their tightfisted charges.

No way to know the U.S mail suffered a similar fate, tossed from ships into the waves to wash ashore, often ruined.

No way to know about John Peck Stearns, a one-legged Vermont lawyer who, upon moving West, eventually quit law to sell lumber, which led him to build the pier.

Unhappy with the local method of lumber delivery--schooners dropped their huge loads overboard and let the tide bring them to shore--Stearns found a partner and built a 1,600-foot pier.

On Sept. 16, 1872, a lumber schooner tied up and unloaded at the wharf, and Santa Barbara was, for the first time, truly linked to the outside world.

“That was, in my opinion, one of the most important events in Santa Barbara in the 19th century,” said Michael Redmon, director of research for the Santa Barbara Historical Society. “It opened Santa Barbara to the rest of the world.”

And to a world of wharf-related setbacks and disasters.

Six years after its completion, a storm destroyed the wharf. A year later, a waterspout tore it apart. Fires and storms continued to plague the wooden structure, which was still 50 years away from getting a protective breakwater.

The Union Pacific Railroad nearly put the wharf out of business, and the oil industry, much to the irritation of residents and environmentalists, gave it a noisy new life, which ended with a disastrous 1969 oil spill. Eventually, the city took over ownership of the wharf and it is now devoted to tourism.