Los Angeles Pier

Salt, sugar, and old wood. The smell reaches you before the pier does. Under your shoes, the boards flex slightly with each step, and between the gaps you can see the Pacific moving, green and patient, below. Gulls hang motionless in the wind over the railings. Somewhere ahead, a roller coaster rattles, and a carousel organ plays a tune from another century.

The Los Angeles Municipal Pier opened on September 9, 1909, and its first purpose was far from romantic: it carried the city's sewer pipe out past the breakers. Even so, thousands of people came on opening day. Walking over the open ocean was a new sensation, and the city quickly understood it had built an attraction, not just infrastructure.

In 1916, carousel builder Charles Looff added a second pier beside the first and raised the Hippodrome, a fantasy of a building with a carnival tower, to house his carousel. The Hippodrome still stands, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 1987. Inside, a hand-carved carousel built in 1922 turns beneath the old rafters, and a ride still costs only a few dollars.

If the building looks familiar, you may have seen it at the movies. The carousel appeared in The Sting in 1973, with Paul Newman playing a crooked operator, and the pier has appeared in countless films and television shows since.

In the 1920s, the enormous La Monica Ballroom rose on the pier. It opened in 1924 as one of the largest ballrooms on the West Coast, and big bands played there through the swing era. Storms and time wore it down, and it was demolished in 1963.

By the early 1970s, the pier itself faced demolition, and officials floated plans to replace it. Residents fought back, packed the council chambers, and won. Then, in the winter of 1983, storms tore away large sections of the structure. The city rebuilt, and the pier reopened piece by piece through the following years.

Today the pier's centerpiece is Pacific Park, a small amusement park with a steel roller coaster that curls above the water and a Ferris wheel that runs on solar power, described as the first of its kind in the world. At night the wheel becomes a slow-turning light show visible far down the coast.

Near the pier entrance stands a sign that reads Los Angeles 66, End of the Trail. Route 66, the old highway from Chicago, officially ended a few blocks inland, but travelers wanted the road to finish at the ocean, and in 2009 the pier embraced the symbolic ending. Road-trippers still arrive dusty and glad, and photograph themselves beneath it.

Walk to the far western end, past the arcade and the fish-and-chips windows. Anglers lean on the rail here day and night; no fishing license is required on a public pier in California. Below deck level, a small aquarium run by the environmental group Heal the Bay lets children touch sea stars and watch rays glide, most of its animals collected from the bay itself.

Just south of the pier lies the original Muscle Beach, where acrobats and bodybuilders trained outdoors from the 1930s onward. The famous weight pen at Venice came later; this sandy plot with its rings and swings is where the California fitness craze began. On weekends, gymnasts still fly over the sand.

The pier also anchors one of the great beach promenades. The Marvin Braude bike path passes beneath it and runs for more than twenty miles along the sand. Rent a bicycle or a pair of skates and the whole bay opens up: volleyball nets, lifeguard towers, and the wide flat beach that made this coastline famous.

Come back at dusk if you can. Buskers play guitar against the sunset, the Ferris wheel runs through its colors, and to the north the dark shoulders of the Los Angeles Mountains slide into the sea toward Malibu. In winter the crowds thin, and the pier belongs to fishermen and fog. The crowd slows down. Everyone leans on the rail, facing west.

A pier is a strange, hopeful kind of architecture: a street that walks into the ocean and simply stops. This one has flooded, decayed, and nearly died more than once, and it is still here, holding its carnival above the waves. Stand at the end, where the boards run out. Behind you is the whole continent. Ahead, nothing but water and light.