This is a small summer story, the story of two beach entertainment parks in the summer.
It eventually gained a reputation as a gambling, a diving bar, a tattoo parlor (when a nice guy came back when he didn’t go nearby), and an unpleasant hangout like a rack, where Victorians had to look hard to find what they called a prostitute.
Famously, someone once found a body there – not as a murder victim, but as a sideshow display. More about him now.
The other parks were not far from the coast, as vibrant and clean cuts as barbershop quartets, painted the colours of sand and sky, with shipships and volatile ocean-inspired adventures, zippy, futuristic razzle dazzle rides.
So, which do you think lasted longer?
It was the first and old – the Pike of Long Beach. In 1902, when an electric car first sweated, Angelenos infused the Beach Breeze and was surprised by the joys of Pike’s carnival, it touched on the joys of Pike’s carnival, like the roller coaster of the legendary cyclone racer who quickly infuriated the riders on the water.
It was eventually replaced in 1979 by a shop set between the Long Beach Convention Center and the Pacific Aquarium.
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The other was the Pacific Park straddled the sands of Santa Monica and Venice. It opened in 1958, three years after Disneyland, and lasted less than 10 years. Santa Monica has seen amusement parks coming for over 120 years, but Pop has quite a few recent memories.
The location should not be confused with the much smaller Pacific Park currently operating at Santa Monica Pier, the heir to the heritage of Long Beachfront Amusement Park in LA.
Historic postcards showing crowds at Pikes in Long Beach.
(From the Pat Morrison collection)
Pop was a Cold War American creature. Westinghouse Electric Corp. has built one display, a replica of the hull of an atom-driven Nautilus submarine. The “spaceship” theater “takes” audiences to Mars and sees the Red Planet and its imaginary inhabitants of Mars. “Tomorrow’s house” [sound familiar, Disneyland fans?] As the old Pomona Progress Newspaper wrote in September 1958, I ran with the convenience of the “electronic age” with “Artistic Expression of Tomorrow of the Atomic City.” The “Ocean Skyway” ride took visitors with a sunny gondola amid the Pacific waves.
Zev Yaroslavsky, a longtime county supervisor and city council member from LA, is still missing the place even decades later. In elementary school, in middle and high school, “Me and my peers took the bus and we had a fun day. It was the perfect place to go with the girl we fell in love with. It was a poor boys Disneyland.”
The postcard will showcase the Pacific Park in Santa Monica.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
You passed through the watery darkness of the aquarium, and when you came out from the other side, Yaroslavski was “greeted by the bright sunlight of the pier in the picture of my vision and the Pacific Ocean.”
“When it closed, I felt an unjust feeling and I’ve missed it ever since.”
In 1960, KSRF (K-Surf) FM station began airing from Pop, but it was pop’s live dance shows that brought big names and crowds, including Richie Barrens, Sam Cook and the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson wrote a short preface to his gorgeous, illustrated book, Pacific Ocean Park, from 2014.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it gave us an excess of entertainment parks. Pop has become one of the busts. Competition from that location in Anaheim was unforgiving. Ocean air, too, was attacked by wood and metal, and generally made of humans, and the prices to keep all of them at bay was unacceptable. The vehicle has broken down and is now uncensored.
The city building project ruined the roads with pop. By the fall of 1967, Pop had been closed – ostensibly for repairs, but in fact forever. The apocalyptic forces working against entertainment parks, neglect, and fires did their handiwork. As the Times wrote in February 1975, “As sooner or later, all dreams will end.”
Still, Pike became a soldier – rather, he sailed a ship. In 1919, Long Beach became the home port of the country’s Pacific Fleet’s battleship fleet, and more ships were followed in time. The Navy is a big business for Long Beach and Pike, and the thousands of navy “gobs” stationed here spent some of their coastal holidays and income.
The postcard depicts “daily scenes at Pike in Long Beach.”
(From the Pat Morrison collection)
Like Las Vegas, Pike has also undergone an identity shift, if not a crisis. It also suffered from a resort competition focused on more families. When parents took their kids off at Disneyland and Berry Farm in Knott, Pike was left more and more in the tastes of the noisy sailors and adults like Footloose Angeleno, as well as pool rooms, bars, dance halls and sideshows.
In 1946, the sideshow fixture was billed as “Miss Elsie Marks, Cobra Woman” and died after a 7-foot diamondback rattlesnake bit her. That was the first big headline. Second, “The Cobra Woman” was actually a 6-foot-3-inch man and was known for many years as Nadir, who had travelled to the Circus Side Show as “the Dog Face Boy”, “The Monkey Man” and “The Bearded Woman”.
Pike’s act of Louche was made for a great copy of the newspaper. In 1914, “The Duke of Pike” – a character from Debonair, who lived largely mainly with cheeks and bad checks – was finally caught when his car broke down in Compton. He had asked the police chief to lend him $10 for repairs when the sergeant recognized him as wanted.
The following year, the businessman who simply said he wanted to show a young girl a sight of Pike was arrested for breaking local laws delicately expressed in the time when the girl lived in his Larges, which was said to be “when approaching an apartment house.”
In 1943, the vice district was at the height of World War II. Atty. Ted Sten announced that gambling continues on Pike. “I personally counted eight last night. There’s a wide open crap game, and the only police there are looking at the merry-go-round.” In fact, Pike was probably the heaviest policed part of Long Beach, but the players become players.
In the 1950s, Pike rebranded itself as nu-pike, with a makeover that attempted to take away more families as a customer. It didn’t rescue Pike, nor was it another new name in the area: after RMS Queen Mary in Ocean Liner, it was permanently anchored in the Long Beach landscape.
Geography itself also opposed Pike. Beyond the actual boundaries, an unpleasant operation was born, but the entire stretch was identified as a “pike.” In 1965, when Long Beach began climbing the harbor, the drove stacked up landfills at the edge of the pike. In short, Pike was no longer on the beach. The man who ran a grill restaurant in Pike’s “fun zone” told The Times in 1979, “They’ve killed business so far has pushed the beach back.”
By 1967, the Long Beach Independent columnist had to protect the town with anonymous letter writers exposing gay bars and brothels in Long Beach, including Pike. In the “notorious hotel” occupied by prostitutes, only one person has been arrested in the past six months.
In 1979, the city had a major plan that didn’t include Pike. “Nu-Pike may not be a Pike,” he ran the headline for The Times. The lease was not renewed. The attraction that had not yet collapsed was defeated.
(The small museum of Pike Artifact, which survived the Line Line Game Arcade in Long Beach, was run by the Roof Family.
View Postcard, Copyright 1910, Pike, Long Beach.
(From the Pat Morrison collection)
By 1979, one of Pike’s primary attractions was already gone.
In 1976, when his arm fell, the wax dummy Daygro Red was moving around in the rough of the dark attraction. Beneath it was human bones, not more wax. The dummy was a mummy – the dried corpse of Elmer McCurdy.
McCurdy is a B-list, turn-of-century outlaw, and he effectively hugged the train in the air, not overturning the gold he thought he was targeting, so his craft is so awful.
He once blows up a train safe full of booty, but “Bang” fuses all the coins into the inner wall of the safe. He was shot down in 1911 by a group of sheriffs held in Oklahoma. His unclaimed body then began to wander. As a greeting at the Oklahoma Funeral Home, as a sideshow attraction to tour the carnival, and even the 1933 precode film “Narcotic” (it wasn’t a speaking role).
On leaving Carny Racket, McCurdy became more famous for death than he was in life. Times columnist Steve Harvey baptized him as the king of Tumbleweed. McCurdy’s Dead Credits: BBC Documentary, Two Biography, Celtic People Song, Murder Mystery Weekend. He was buried in a historic cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma. —Under a 2-foot concrete layer, don’t let anyone tempt you to take them on tour again.
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