I know that the people in this 1880 photo were Victorians with a very strong and rigid sense of propriety, but still, just the idea of spending the day sitting on Santa Monica Beach and strolling along the pier while fully clothed makes me sweat. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable those Angelenos in this photo must have been by the end of a summer day.
It’s not the same pier, and the beach itself is now MUCH wider, and that wooden walkway is now a parking lot, but this is roughly the same view in February 2019:
This could be a June Gloom day in Santa Monica.
“Strong and rigid sense of propriety”?
I’ll take that over grotesquely obese, muffintop horrors
improperly underdressed any day.
You raise a good point, Rich!
I’m not convinced this 1880. Trains did not come to the beach until 1902. When was SM pier built? Not in 1880, although it was established as a city in 1875. Is that really SM pier?
Good call, William. I just looked it up and the first Santa Monica pier wasn’t built until 1909. So this obviously isn’t Santa Monica beach, then. Malibu, Venice, and Hermosa beach piers were built a couple of years before that, so maybe this isn’t California at all!
The long pier is key. The clothing could 1905, few even knew of the beach until the trains started running. I’m not familiar with the southern piers Hermosa, Huntington but they could be the pier featured in the photo and Long Beach was on the Huntington Train route (which circled through So. California all the way to Berdoo). I can’t recall what the SM pier had on it when originally built, but I know by 1908 there were rollercoasters and other entertainment options at SM’s piers (may have been three by then: 2 in Ocean Park and one in SM). Malibu had no pier because Roosevelt Hwy didn’t get that far. The Longest Pier, a little north of the California Incline, went way out 1/4 mile. I wonder if this photo were flipped and the pier was now on the Northside if it could be the Longest Pier…
It’s weird because even Wikipedia thinks it the SM pier in 1880!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SantaMonica-Pier-1880.jpg
No further proof needed that Wiki is as good as its source…which in this case ain’t lodged in fact…
But…but…but…it’s Wiki!!
Back then, people just didn’t have the number of different clothes that we have now. They had their everyday clothes, and their “Sunday” clothes. You can see workmen in the old days doing manual labor in suits and ties. It threw me when I was a kid, but that’s just the way it was.
Photos from the latter days of Hotel Arcadia do provide a newer SM pier in the 1900-10 era before they closed down the old hotel. Earlier piers dating back to the first railroad days were a bit southward and right out from the hotel site where the rail reserve lands sat atop the bluffs. These were all destroyed or dismantled with the line extensions up the coast to the Long Wharf site above Santa Monica canyon (Sunset Blvd. projection). The rail line itself was shifted northward and subducted into a cut that turned via a tunnel. This newer pier would be just beyond that feature, about where the more modern piers are found over the next sequence of decades. Women’s dresses come up above ground dragging level around the 1910 era, but it could be as early as about 1905.