The Santa Monica Pier

　
　
　
　
　

The Santa Monica Pier

By Justin Gomillion

　
Introduction     I have lived all of my life in Lancaster, California, a medium sized city located in the Mojave Desert about sixty miles north of Los Angeles. The weather out here is schizophrenic, it gets up in the hundreds during the summer, it snows sometimes in the winter, and it can go from nice to windy without warning. Regardless of the time of the year, one thing that my friends and I loved to do when we had the time was to travel down to the Santa Monica Pier and hang out. We always had a good time; there was moisture in the air, no wind, and plenty of girls to go around. I have a lot of good memories from my time spent at the pier, which made me wonder why I seemed to have this connection with it and if others had it as well, since we weren’t the only people there.
     When our class had our ethnography project assigned, the pier was the first place that came to my mind that I wanted to study. I wanted to better understand the connection that I had with it, so I decided to research and study the relationship that people had with the pier. However, as anyone who has ever had a boyfriend or girlfriend will tell you, relationships where only half of the couple is engaged are relationships that don’t work. Therefore, I also decided to research and study the relationship that the pier has with people.
     If you have ever been to the Santa Monica Pier, then you know it is a very unique place. From the aquarium and muscle beach out to the observation post at its tip, the little shops and vendors selling wares from their carts along the way, everything about the pier really gives off this unique vibe that you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere. What really stands out about the Santa Monica Pier for me though, is the Playland Arcade and Pacific Park. These two parts of the pier are extremely special because they cater to the younger part of the population and this is noteworthy for many reasons. Locations that are geared towards entertaining the younger population are very important culturally in Los Angeles. They help to bring this sort of sense of tradition and belonging to a city that doesn’t really have one because it is so large and culturally diverse.
     When it came time to start going into the field, I knew what I wanted to study, but I didn’t have a specific question that I wanted to find an answer to. I thought that if I would go into the field for the first time, I would come up with a question to try and answer. However, after that first trip, nothing really stood out to me so I decided to do some research some of the history of the pier. I found that in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s there were a number of plans going through city council to destroy the pier and replace it with condominiums among other things. Upon hearing of this, the people of the city stood up, made their voices heard, and protested. It seems pretty ordinary right? Well, what really makes it special for me was that the majority of the protests were by young people who wanted to save their favorite hangout spot. I think that today, my generation has a negative stigma associated with it. The world today is much different than it was then and life is generally easier for us than it was for our parents. However, I think that because we have had it that little bit easier that people see us as lazy, entitled, and spoiled, not that its entirely wrong. Just turn on MTV later and you will see what I mean. The actions of a very select few young people shouldn’t make everybody view the majority in that way. This discovery gave me a specific focus in regards to my project. I still wanted to and did study the relationship between the people and the pier, but I had the specific goal in mind to see if a similar thing were to happen today, would my generation stand together and make our voice heard to save the pier again? I knew that my generation was so much better than some people were giving us credit for and I wanted to prove it.
Data Collection and Description     For my next four trips into the field, I collected a lot of information to help me to answer this question. I made maps of the pier, took field notes of things that I saw and heard, interviewed some people, and took inventory of what people were doing. Most of it was helpful and some of it was just interesting, but I was able to learn a lot about the relationship people had with the pier and get closer to answering my question.
Listening to and holding conversations with people is a very good tool for learning about things because you get to see other people’s perspectives on things. On one occasion, I listened in on a discussion between a father and son over a game of air hockey and the dad told his son that he went on the first date with the mother at the pier. Another time, I interviewed a nanny, Vicky, who, in the middle of our conversation, spoke to the little girl she was watching, "When I was about your age, my mom used to bring me here every weekend and I loved the spinner" to which the little girl responded by bolting off in the direction of the ride. I even heard a nice little gem from a little girl talking to her mom about how she wanted to go play at the "big kid’s playground" (muscle beach) because they were done riding rides at the pier. In total, I did eleven interviews, but only three of them really had all of the information that I wanted to collect. It was definitely a lot harder than I expected it would be to get people to talk to me, I only had the eleven people talk to me in two trips to the field. I was still able to get a lot of information from listening to others; you’d be surprised to hear what people say to each other when they think no one else is listening.
     Mapping the pier, observing people, and taking inventory of things they were doing was also a very valuable tool in the process of collecting research. Making a map of the pier helped me to get to know the space a little better. Making the movement maps, observing people, and taking inventories made it much easier to develop an understanding of how people used the space and how that defined the relationship they had with it. I made two traditional maps, one of the entire pier and one of the interior of Playland Arcade. I also made two movement maps. They both were of the same area, from the front entrance of Playland Arcade to the entrance of Pacific Park just a little way down the pier. I did one at mid-afternoon on a Saturday and another at lunchtime on a Tuesday. I did the same thing with behavioral inventories; I made two about what people were doing inside the arcade just after I made the movement maps. I didn’t really have any challenges with making the traditional maps, but it was sort of difficult to make an accurate movement map and inventory on the Saturday due to the volume of people there that day. It wasn’t really that big of a deal though because I still was able to record the general trends in behavior, which was what I really needed anyway. So after collecting all this data, what did I learn from it?
     My movement maps definitely helped me to understand the how people use the space. Pacific Park and Playland Arcade are basically unavoidable from what I recorded. An overwhelming majority of the people who went to the pier at least walked through these areas, which for me shows that the park and arcade are culturally important to the area. A girl I interviewed named Sarah said, "In my opinion, its (the pier) as iconic as the Hollywood sign or the stars on the walk of fame are to LA. I can’t imagine having grown up here without having been able to come hang out and play." In some of my other interviews, I got similar responses from people. Everybody seemed to have this memory of the pier that was special for them. I can still remember my first kiss back on a Friday night in January in 2007 when I went to the pier with my girlfriend at the time and we got stopped at the top of the Ferris wheel. Its experiences like these that build a connection between people and the pier and my movement maps helped confirmed that.
     Taking behavioral inventories of the people inside the arcade also was very helpful. I was able to learn about which kinds of people used the arcade at certain times and what games were the most popular as well and like the movement maps, the behavioral inventories also helped me to confirm the connection between the youth and the pier. For the most part, people that played the arcade games were about twenty-five or younger. The people who were outside this age range typically played pinball or the ticket spitting machines with their kids. One man I interviewed named James said that, "I like to bring my kids in here to let them play the games to try and win some tickets so they can get some prizes. They really love the feeling of winning something even when it’s not that big. When I get the chance though, I try and play pinball. I remember having a machine like those when I was younger and it’s still fun to play after all these years." For the twenty-five and younger age group, the games that were used most often were the shooting and fighting games, which as a person who plays video games on occasion didn’t really surprise me. A lot of the people playing these games were male, but there were a lot of females playing games in the arcade as well. It was interesting because they tended to play the racing games, which I would not have guessed on my own.
     As far as answering my question, would my generation today protest the destruction of the pier, interviews were the most helpful information I collected. The rest of the data that I collected served to confirm the relationship between people and the pier, but the interviews gave me a definite answer. Out of the eleven interviews that I did, only two were of adults and the rest were about my age and their answer was yes. Generally, they didn’t know much, if anything at all, about the original protest. The common reaction was a lot like mine, shock, because it seems so strange that a place as popular as the pier would ever be in danger of getting torn down and it’s pretty hard to understand the thinking behind it. They overwhelmingly answered yes when I asked if they would get involved today to prevent the pier from getting destroyed. One person that I interviewed, Junior, described his political involvement to me. He said, "Even though we tend to get a bad rep about being politically and socially involved, we are a lot more into these things than we get credit for. Whenever I get the chance I like to go down to city hall and participate in the town meetings there. It’s actually surprisingly high tech. If you can’t attend the meetings in person, they usually have a section at the end so you can Skype in and still make your voice heard." Not everyone that I interviewed was as politically involved as Junior, some people didn’t even know how to register to vote, but they all said they would do whatever they could to save this place that held some memories for them.
Data Analysis     When I analyzed at all the data together, there were two major trends that stood out to me. The first, I liked to call the babysitting factor. I went a couple of times in the early afternoon on weekdays and most of the people who were inside the Playland Arcade and Pacific Park were young kids with their parents or nannies. I think the lack of other groups of people can be explained by the time of day, kids are still in school during the week and most adults are off at work. I didn’t quite get the reason why this particular group of people liked to visit at this time though until I had my interview with Vicky, the nanny. She explained it like this, "For me, being a nanny is my full time job. Her parents work all day and she’s still too young to start school so I’m basically a full time babysitter. I think it’s good for her to get out of the house and explore every once in a while and now is the perfect time to come to the pier. It’s walking distance form
the house and it’s not crowded at this time so I don’t have to worry about her getting lost or anything like that." The pier is a very kid oriented place during the week and it was interesting to learn that because it’s something that I never would have even thought about before. It also helps to reinforce the idea I had about people having a connection with the pier. Things that occur in our youth tend to shape our lives and I think the fact that these kids are getting to spend a lot of time here is definitely going to create this connection for them.
     The other major trend that I noticed from analyzing all of my data is something that I like to call the date night effect. It actually kind of goes hand in hand with the nanny effect in that it occurs at pretty much the rest of the time. Weeknights and the weekend in particular are times when people are off work and school so the pier is a lot busier. When I was there on the weekends and at night, the pier had a little different feel to it. There were more groups of high school aged kids, there were a lot of couples who seemed to be on dates, and it got used differently. The air hockey tables and some of the multiplayer oriented games inside the arcade that were previously lightly used became the main attractions. Also, a lot of the bigger rides like the Pacific Wheel and the West Coaster had lines to ride them filled with people, while they were basically walk on earlier in the day. In my interview with Junior, he explained why he liked to take his girlfriend to the pier. "I’m actually here with my girlfriend tonight. She went off with her friends to go get some pictures in a photo booth back that way. It’s really nice because we get to spend the day at the beach in the ocean and then when the sun goes down we can come up here and do some rides and play some games. It’s way cheaper than going to like Disneyland or something and I think it’s a lot more fun too." A lot of people that I talked to or overheard had similar things to say about the pier. The pier is like the perfect place to have a good time and because of that; it kind of draws us in and creates a connection with us.
     In our class, we read a little about urban theory from a couple different authors. Out of all the reading, there were two people whose theories seemed to apply to my project in particular. The first of these was Castells’ "An Introduction to the Information Age". The main idea of his work was that cities aren’t places, but spaces where uncontrollable flows pass by. They only exist because of the flows of money, goods, people, and commodities that go through them. This applies to my work because it helps me to understand the relationship between the pier and the people and some of why the people protested the demolition of the pier. Without the flow of money and people through it, the pier wouldn’t exist. The space would be there, but the idea of the place wouldn’t. Conversely though, the flow of people and money wouldn’t go through the pier if the place didn’t exist. Would you still go and hang out at the beach in Santa Monica if the pier weren’t there? I think that this article definitely added to what my research was telling me about the pier, but I think that in the case of the pier, the place attracts the flow which is something that is very unique (Castells 1997).
     The other article that stood out to me was de Certeau’s "The Practice of Everyday Life". The main ideas that were conveyed in his article were that walking was a form of protest and that people use rules that are established by the system to fight it. Because of the nature of my own research question, it is very easy to draw the parallels between his article and my work. The pier was set to be destroyed, but the people used the established rules of the system to fight it and save the pier. What I found really interesting in the article was that he said that the government constructed spaces in a way that would control the population and they favored unity within the city. During the time of the protests, there were a lot of changes that were going on in the country and it was a little wild. This might not have been the original idea, but did the government see the people protesting and think they could "appease" them by letting them keep the pier while they gained another level of control over the population? I don’t know how I would go about researching this question, but I think it definitely is something worth looking into (de Certeau 1984).
Conclusion     In the course of doing this project, I was able to learn many things about people and places in general. I think that anywhere that you go, you can find a place that is special to someone. A lot of connections that we make with people, places, and things come from when we are young so anything really has the potential to be a special for someone and I think that its these connections that make our society function today. Before this project, I used to look at the pier differently, but since I’ve changed my perspective. It was somewhere that I loved to go to, but if I had the chance to go to Six Flags for a day instead, then I would go there because the pier wasn’t as exciting as Six Flags. That’s the problem though because I was looking at what wasn’t there, when in reality the pier is just as cool a place to hang out as Six Flags. I think that if people change their perspective and look at what is there instead of what isn’t, then they would be able to see what makes any place special. I think that this applies to everything in life too, if you open your mind to new ideas and a new point of view then the world is something that you can truly enjoy.
     I think that my work at the pier was very successful. I was able to answer the question that I set out to and prove my hunch that my generation is better than the reputation that we were given. I was also able to learn about the relationship between the people and the pier. It is definitely one that is symbiotic as we both give to each other and flourish because of it. The pier is still around today because of the protests from our parent’s generation in their youth and we get to go there and have a good time with our friends and family because it exists. The only real loose end of sorts is that I came up with a new question that I didn’t get an answer to, did the government allow the pier to continue its existence as a form of population control? I really enjoyed the time I got to spend at the pier and I am very thankful to have had the opportunity to study there.
　
　
　

Works Cited

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California,
1984. 91+. Print
Gfbertini. "An Introduction to the Information Age- Manuel Castells." Scribd. Web. 16 May. 2012. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/22569082/An-introduction-to-the-information-age-Manuel-Castells>.