Beach Feb 2018

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old tales indicate he arrived with
both slaves and profits from the
cotton plantation he’d operated
down South; one of the town’s
early histories claims he built a
small pier in order to smuggle
opium from China.
What is factual, according to
Dennis, is Duncan did indeed
build the first house in what was
to become Manhattan Beach. As
nearby Redondo Beach and Hermosa
Beach formed in the late
1800s, the sandy area to the north,
all dust and dunes, was considered
undesirable – after all, who would
want to live amidst all that sand?
Duncan paid $1,000 in gold to the
Redondo Land Company for 87
and one quarter acres and in 1895
built a mansion on the hill overlooking
the scraggly settlement
originally known as Potencia. The
following year, for $680, he bought
another 100 acres that stretched
down to the water. It’s clear he
built an oceanside structure of
some sort, Dennis reports, though
it’s unclear if he built a pier.
The city’s first known pier, built
around the turn of the 20th century,
was a somewhat ramshackle
affair, in keeping with the fledgling
town itself. It was dubbed “the Old
Iron Pier” and fashioned out of railroad
ties and timbers affixed with a
900 ft. wooden platform for fishermen.
“Back then Manhattan Beach was
just sort of a little village,” Dennis
said. “People couldn’t get here because
of the dunes...Nobody came
here. So they decided, well, we’ll
build a fishing pier. That is what it
was for — when the Red Car came
down from LA, they’d come here to
fish.”
But as Dennis notes in her book,
“A Walk Beside the Sea: A History
of Manhattan Beach,” the odd little
pier quickly became a focal point
for many of the town’s activities.
Then, in 1913, storms wiped the
pier out, and city fathers decided to
float a public bond to build a more
permanent structure. A proposed
$75,000 bond failed in 1914, 168
votes to 170, largely due to a contingent
of “Northenders” who
wanted it located at the end of Marine
Street. In 1916, a compromise
was passed overwhelmingly, one
that included $70,000 for a pier at
the foot of Manhattan Beach Boulevard
(then Center Street) and
$20,000 for a pavillion at Marine.
Engineer A.L. Harris had the idea
for the Roundhouse. “Now in regard
to a round end, it is a feature
that hasn’t been, as yet, brought out
on any other pier along the coast
that I know of...another reason for
having the circular end is that it is
much stronger against the action of
the waves,” Harris said at a meeting
of the city’s board of trustees.
Material shortages due to WWI
delayed its construction but finally
the pier and a Roundhouse that
looks almost identical to today’s facility
were constructed in 1920.
The pier would remain largely
unchanged until the 1980s, when
Judge Richard L. Fruin established
OTS, and the Roundhouse took on
a new function as a marine science
teaching station. But the pier itself
was falling apart; there was a proposal
to destroy the entire structure
and rebuild. An activist group
called Pier Pressure, led by Keith
Robinson and Julia Tedesco, fought
for its preservation. A 3-2 council
vote in 1986 favored restoring the
pier rather than replacing it, and in
1991 a $2.39 million project to rehabilitate
the pier got underway.
By the time Michael Greenberg
met with OTS staff immediately
after his son’s passing in 2015, the
pier was in most ways flourishing.
More than 300,000 people visited it
annually, including 15,000 kids
who participate in programs at the
Roundhouse Aquarium. But beneath
the surface, the pier was in
a state of deterioration, and the
Aquarium’s facilities were being
held together largely by the inventiveness
of its co-directors, Eric
Martin and Val Hill.
“It’s been over 15 years since our
last renovation, and things have
started to go downhill,” said John
Roberts, the chair of the OTS board
of directors. “In a marine environment,
things don’t last too long.”
Greenberg’s initial notion was
possibly to refurbish a tank or two
at the Aquarium. But a Greenberg
family trait appears to be a certain
boundlessness, and as he considered
the facility’s needs a bigger
idea began to emerge.
“I'm thinking to myself, it's so dilapidated,
it’s so old,” he recalled.
“And something triggered the
thought, ‘Well, why don't we put
in an entirely new aquarium, and
reimagine this aquarium?”
He pledged a million dollars on
the spot, in addition to the quarter
million already contributed to Harrison’s
Foundation. The city, it
turned out, already had plans to
retrofit the pier itself, and thus a
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26 Easy Reader / Beach magazine • February 8, 2018