125 years of the Santa Monica Pier links Schwarznegger, Popeye, more

When we meet on a video call for this interview, Santa Monica Pier’s executive director and historian James Harris is in his office, a former apartment in the historic merry-go-round building that also appeared in the 1973 film “The Sting.”

“That movie is not even set in California. It’s set in Depression-era Chicago,” Harris notes. “So the Santa Monica Pier is in one of the most iconic movies ever made about Chicago. The other end of Route 66.”

In the revised edition of Harris’ book “Santa Monica Pier: America’s Last Great Pleasure Pier,” out now from Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library, the author delves into the many lives of the 125-year-old landmark.

In 1989, Harris, then a recent college graduate from Colorado, was a bartender at the Boathouse, the Santa Monica Pier restaurant that has long since given way to a Bubba Gump Shrimp. The Pier was a different scene in the late 1980s.

Visitors were typically tourists trying to access the beach. At that time, there was a tent city under the Pier, Harris recalls, and, on one of his first weekends on the job, he had to call 911 to report a shooting.

“The Pier and I grew up together,” he says.

Over the years, Santa Monica Pier would evolve into one of Los Angeles County’s biggest tourist attractions. But back when Harris first worked there, it offered little more than the sunset view from the Boathouse’s bar.

“Over coffee or cocktails, people would tell these great stories at the bar,” he says. “I was putting them in the back of my mind and it was helping me to fall in love with the Pier.”

In 2007, Harris had the opportunity to write the history of the Pier. “Immediately, I knew that I had to reconnect with those people and start interviewing more people,” he says.

The book was first published in 2009 to celebrate Santa Monica Pier’s centennial. In the book’s foreword, which appeared in the original edition (as well as the new one), Robert Redford recalls childhood visits to the Pier.

“Having spent, by that time, about 20 years on the Pier, and having done a lot of research, I thought I had done a good, definitive story about the Santa Monica Pier,” says Harris.

But upon the book’s initial release, he started hearing more from people with stories or questions about the landmark.

“Someone walked into my office one day and said, ‘Is it true that Walter Hopps had his first ever curated art show inside the merry-go-round building in the 1950s?’” Harris recalls.

It was. Hopps, the famed contemporary art curator, co-organized a show inside the merry-go-round building in 1955. Craig Kaufman and Paul Sarkisian were two artists in the group exhibition, which was called “Action.” Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac were among the attendees.

The merry-go-round building played a role in the 1960 film “Night Tide,” which is perhaps best known as Dennis Hopper’s first starring role. When the actor’s memorial was held in the merry-go-round building, it opened with footage from the film.

“It’s been one those great secrets that’s been a pleasure to share in the book,” says Harris about what went on inside the merry-go-round building. “These were apartments up here. People lived here. There were two children born up here. There were lavish parties thrown upstairs and downstairs by a woman named Colleen Creedon, that’s what she became known for.”

But the legends of the Pier extended outside of the merry-go-round building. The cartoonist E.C. Segar frequented the Pier, where he and his assistant would brainstorm while rowing boats rented from Olaf Olsen.

Olsen was a pipe-smoking, retired sailor who led a remarkable life that included campaigning to protect local marine life back in 1928. When originally researching the book, Harris kept seeing Olsen’s name come up in old newspaper articles. Then he found the man’s obituary. “The last line in his obituary was, ‘Also, he was also the physical model for Popeye,’” Harris recalls.

The new edition of “The Santa Monica Pier” includes an afterword from former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Harris had worked with the action star-turned-politician on his strongman competition, which was held twice at the Pier.

“I could tell from the way that he talked about the Pier that he had an attachment that was beyond what he was doing with weightlifting and it being an iconic venue,” says Harris. “Over lunch one day, he told me that the reason he wanted to live in the Santa Monica area … was because of Muscle Beach, the original location of Muscle Beach. It was considered to be the birthplace of the fitness movement.”

Accompanying Schwarzenegger’s afterword is a photo of him in his youth, flexing with the pilings of the Pier behind him.

When asked what has kept him at the Pier for so long, Harris says, “The people. The people who come down over cocktails or coffee and talk about what the Pier used to be like and that love that they have for something that has been here for so long.”