When We Were Young With Our Corvettes - Vol 4

[Bill O.]

^th

[Francis F.]

Re: When We Were Young With Our Corvettes - Vol 4

BILL,
please continue...
Francis

[Bill O.]

Re: When We Were Young With Our Corvettes - Vol 4

Francis,
just for you...

I’m standing at the entrance to the Hermosa Beach Pier… remembering…and looking around, keenly aware of how things change in life, sometimes suddenly, other times not….all so very unpredictable. What began on this spot in 1904, as a wooden structure extending five-hundred feet over the water…that was partially washed away by a winter storm in 1913…then rebuilt of concrete with an asphalt top and enlarged to one-thousand feet in 1914, and continually battered and weakened by the waves such as to require constant repair to the pilings…ended when two violent squalls in 1940, and 1945, swept-away the seaward portions and the remainder was condemned as unsafe and closed to the public. After a decade of political wrangling over financing to rebuild, what was left of the pier that was shuttered in 1946, was finally demolished in 1961.

Now the original archway in the center of the pier-head, which houses the Public Library and the Chamber of Commerce, leads only to the pavilion in back and a barricade overlooking the empty water…the warning sign, “vehicles prohibited on the pier” now oddly out of place. This, too, would soon be razed…making way for a completely new and sea-worthy fishing pier (dedicated in 1965) that had been in the planning stages “forever.”

I gaze north a few hundred yards at the town’s first and only high rise building. Positioned along the beach, this dominating, six-story structure came to life in 1923, as the exclusive Surf and Sand Club, soon becoming the Hermosa Biltmore Hotel, the most luxurious resort in coastal southwestern LA County.