pier for docking ships; this was a pier for, well, pleasure. It had a midway with all kinds of carnival games and cheap food treats, and a dance hall, replete with a cork-lined dance floor.
It opened for business on the Fourth of July, 1927, to flags, fanfare, and fireworks and was a massive success. And why not. It was a beautifully simple, hedonistic idea—combine the beauty of the ocean and the beach with women in “bathing costumes,” junk food, and then the nocturnal Roaring Twenties pleasures of illegal booze, jazz, and dancing, with sex to follow at the beachside hotels that sprang up around the pier.
All good, except that Earl and Earnest forgot to creosote the pilings that supported the pier, and “water-born parasites” started eating the thing. (The uncharitable would have it that water-born parasites—that is, surf bums—still infest Pacific Beach.) Pickering’s Pleasure Pier started crumbling into the ocean and, a year after opening, had to be closed for safety purposes. The party was over.
Truly, because with exquisite Pacific Beach timing, the town had reinvigorated itself just in time for the Great Depression.
The tents went up again, but the Depression wasn’t as severe in San Diego as it was in a lot of the country, because the navy base in the harbor cushioned the unemployment. And a lot of people loved Pacific Beach in those years for precisely what it didn’t have: a lot of people, houses, traffic. They loved it precisely because it was a sleepy, friendly little townwith one of the best stretches of beach in these United States, and the beach was free and accessible to everyone, and there were no hotels or condo complexes, no private drives.
What changed Pacific Beach forever was a nose.
Dorothy Fleet’s sensitive nose, to be exact.
In 1935, her husband, Reuben, owned a company called Consolidated Aircraft, which had a contract with the U.S. government to design and build seaplanes. The problem was that Consolidated was located in Buffalo, and it was hard to land seaplanes on water that was usually ice. So Reuben decided to move the company to warm and sunny California, and he gave his wife, Dorothy, a choice between San Diego and Long Beach. Dorothy didn’t like Long Beach because of the “smelly oil wells” nearby, so she picked San Diego, and Fleet built his factory on a site near the airport, where he and his eight hundred workers came out with the great PBY Catalina.
Airplanes had a lot to do with creating modern Pacific Beach, because Japanese bombers hitting Pearl Harbor launched the Consolidated factory into high gear. Suddenly faced with the job of producing thousands of PBYs plus the new B-24 bomber, Fleet imported thousands of workers—15,000 by early 1942, 45,000 by the war’s end. Working 24/7 they pumped out 33,000 aircraft during the war.
They had to live somewhere, and the nearby empty flats of Pacific Beach made the perfect location to put up quick, cheap housing.
And it wasn’t just Consolidated Aircraft, for San Diego became the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet, and between the navy bases around San Diego Harbor and the marine training bases at Elliott and Pendleton, up by Oceanside, the whole area became a military town. The city’s population jumped from 200,000 in 1941 to 500,000 by 1943. The government built a number of housing projects in Pacific Beach—Bayview Terrace, Los Altos, Cyanne—and a lot of the men and women who came to live in them temporarily never went home. A lot of the sailors and marines who were stationed in San Diego on their way to and from the Pacific front decided to come back and build lives there.
Much of PB, especially inland from the beach, still has that blue-and-khaki-collar mentality—unlike its tonier neighbor to the north, La Jolla—and a fiercely egalitarian ethic that is a holdover from the close-living, pooled ration card, and backyard party days of the war. Notoriouslycasual, PB residents aren’t at all bothered
It opened for business on the Fourth of July, 1927, to flags, fanfare, and fireworks and was a massive success. And why not. It was a beautifully simple, hedonistic idea—combine the beauty of the ocean and the beach with women in “bathing costumes,” junk food, and then the nocturnal Roaring Twenties pleasures of illegal booze, jazz, and dancing, with sex to follow at the beachside hotels that sprang up around the pier.
All good, except that Earl and Earnest forgot to creosote the pilings that supported the pier, and “water-born parasites” started eating the thing. (The uncharitable would have it that water-born parasites—that is, surf bums—still infest Pacific Beach.) Pickering’s Pleasure Pier started crumbling into the ocean and, a year after opening, had to be closed for safety purposes. The party was over.
Truly, because with exquisite Pacific Beach timing, the town had reinvigorated itself just in time for the Great Depression.
The tents went up again, but the Depression wasn’t as severe in San Diego as it was in a lot of the country, because the navy base in the harbor cushioned the unemployment. And a lot of people loved Pacific Beach in those years for precisely what it didn’t have: a lot of people, houses, traffic. They loved it precisely because it was a sleepy, friendly little townwith one of the best stretches of beach in these United States, and the beach was free and accessible to everyone, and there were no hotels or condo complexes, no private drives.
What changed Pacific Beach forever was a nose.
Dorothy Fleet’s sensitive nose, to be exact.
In 1935, her husband, Reuben, owned a company called Consolidated Aircraft, which had a contract with the U.S. government to design and build seaplanes. The problem was that Consolidated was located in Buffalo, and it was hard to land seaplanes on water that was usually ice. So Reuben decided to move the company to warm and sunny California, and he gave his wife, Dorothy, a choice between San Diego and Long Beach. Dorothy didn’t like Long Beach because of the “smelly oil wells” nearby, so she picked San Diego, and Fleet built his factory on a site near the airport, where he and his eight hundred workers came out with the great PBY Catalina.
Airplanes had a lot to do with creating modern Pacific Beach, because Japanese bombers hitting Pearl Harbor launched the Consolidated factory into high gear. Suddenly faced with the job of producing thousands of PBYs plus the new B-24 bomber, Fleet imported thousands of workers—15,000 by early 1942, 45,000 by the war’s end. Working 24/7 they pumped out 33,000 aircraft during the war.
They had to live somewhere, and the nearby empty flats of Pacific Beach made the perfect location to put up quick, cheap housing.
And it wasn’t just Consolidated Aircraft, for San Diego became the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet, and between the navy bases around San Diego Harbor and the marine training bases at Elliott and Pendleton, up by Oceanside, the whole area became a military town. The city’s population jumped from 200,000 in 1941 to 500,000 by 1943. The government built a number of housing projects in Pacific Beach—Bayview Terrace, Los Altos, Cyanne—and a lot of the men and women who came to live in them temporarily never went home. A lot of the sailors and marines who were stationed in San Diego on their way to and from the Pacific front decided to come back and build lives there.
Much of PB, especially inland from the beach, still has that blue-and-khaki-collar mentality—unlike its tonier neighbor to the north, La Jolla—and a fiercely egalitarian ethic that is a holdover from the close-living, pooled ration card, and backyard party days of the war. Notoriouslycasual, PB residents aren’t at all bothered
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