This is a short summertime narrative about two historic beach amusement parks:
Eventually, one developed a reputation as a seedy, shady place where you could easily find gambling, dive bars, tattoo parlors (back when decent people avoided them), and dirty doves, or prostitutes as the Victorians called them.
Notably, a corpse—not a murder victim—was discovered there once as a sideshow exhibit. More on him now.
Not far up the coast, the other park was as lively and well-groomed as a quartet from a barbershop, painted the colors of sand and sky, and included futuristic, razzle-dazzle rides and shipshape and jaunty ocean-inspired experiences.
Which one, in your opinion, lasted longer?
Long Beach was the location of the original, older Pike. The Pike’s carnival attractions, including as the legendary Cyclone Racer roller coaster, which swooped its riders rapidly and furiously above the ocean, were first enjoyed by sweating, landlocked Angelenos in 1902, when the electric vehicles first arrived.
Finally completed in 1979, it was replaced by stores positioned between the Aquarium of the Pacific and the Long Beach Convention Center.
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The other, Pacific Ocean Park, was situated between the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica. It didn’t even endure ten years after opening in 1958, three years after Disneyland. Although there have been amusement parks in Santa Monica for over 120 years, POP is relatively new and has a positive reputation.
The considerably smaller Pacific Park, which is currently operating on the Santa Monica pier and is the heir to L.A.’s long history of beachside amusement parks, should not be mistaken with that location.
POP originated in America during the Cold War. One exhibit, a model of the atomic-powered Nautilus submarine’s hull, was constructed by Westinghouse Electric Corp. and featured sound effects reminiscent of an actual submarine at sea. The audience was transported to Mars via a spacecraft theater to witness the Red Planet and its hypothetical inhabitants. In September 1958, the old Pomona Progress-Bulletin newspaper wrote, “A house of tomorrow”—sounds familiar, Disneyland fans?—that ran on the conveniences of the electronic age and featured an artistic depiction of the atomic city of the future. Visitors were transported over the Pacific waves in transparent gondolas on an ocean skyway trip.
Even after all these years, Zev Yaroslavsky, a native of Los Angeles, a former county supervisor, and a member of the city council, still longs for the city. My friends and I would ride the bus out there and have a good time during the day in elementary, junior high, and high school. We loved going there with females we were crushing on. It was Disneyland for the poor boy.
Like being transported from the mundane to the thrilling fantasy world of a seaside amusement park, Yaroslavsky recalls that you entered the aquarium through the watery darkness and emerged on the other side to find the bright sunshine on the pier with the attractions and the Pacific Ocean in my line of sight.
When it closed, I felt wronged, and I’ve missed it ever since.
An FM station called KSRF K-Surf started airing from POP in 1960, but it was POP’s live dance performances that attracted well-known performers and their fan bases, including Ritchie Valens, Sam Cooke, and the Beach Boys. Pacific Ocean Park, a beautifully drawn book published in 2014, has a brief foreword by Brian Wilson.
We had an abundance of amusement parks in the 1950s and 1960s, but like every boom, there followed a bust. One of the busted was POP. There was constant competition from that location in Anaheim. The cost of preventing the attack on wood, metal, and other human-made objects was too high. This is also true of sea air. Rides malfunctioned and were not fixed.
The roads leading to POP were messed up by city construction work. POP was shut down permanently during the fall of 1967, supposedly for repairs. Fires, negligence, and other apocalyptic forces that oppose amusement parks carried out their labor.All aspirations eventually come to an end, as The Times stated in February 1975, as the last remnants of POP were being destroyed.
The ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles compete with the majority of global cargo hubs. Ports may have to reinvent themselves as a result of President Trump’s tariffs.
But instead, the Pike continued to sail. The country’s Pacific fleet of battleships began calling Long Beach home in 1919, and eventually more ships joined. Long Beach and the Pike, where hundreds of Navy men stationed here spent some of their shore vacation and money, were heavily reliant on the Navy.
Similar to Las Vegas, the Pike experienced a change in identity, if not a crisis. The competition from more family-oriented resorts hurt it too. The Pike was increasingly abandoned to adults, such as rowdy sailors and sloppy Angelenos, with their preferences for dance halls, pubs, pool rooms, and sideshows, while parents took their children on vacation to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm.
A carnival performer known as Miss Elsie Marks, the Cobra Woman, passed away in 1946 after being bitten by a seven-foot diamondback rattlesnake. The first major headline was that one. The second was that the Cobra Woman was actually a 6-foot-3-inch guy with the last name Nadir. He had performed in circus sideshows for many years as the bearded lady, the monkey man, and the dog-faced youngster.
The louche actions of the Pike made for excellent newspaper material. When his automobile broke down in Compton in 1914, the Duke of the Pike, a dapper man who lived luxuriously, primarily on brash face and bad checks, was apprehended. A sergeant identified him as a wanted man while he was requesting a $10 loan from the police chief for repairs.
The following year, a businessman was imprisoned for violating a local ordinance that The Times delicately framed as being in a certain state of mind when visiting an apartment house where the girl was living on his largesse. He said that he had only wished to show the young girl the sights on the Pike.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Ted Sten declared that gambling was taking place on the Pike in 1943, during the height of World War II: I personally counted eight last night. The only cops down there are keeping an eye on the merry-go-round, and there are open-air crap games. Players will be players, even though the Pike was likely the area of Long Beach with the biggest police presence.
In an attempt to attract more families as customers, the Pike changed its name to Nu-Pike in the 1950s. Both that and a new neighborhood name, Queen Park, after the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary, which was permanently anchored on the Long Beach landscape, failed to save the Pike.
Geographical factors also worked against the Pike. Unsavory businesses began to emerge beyond its true boundaries, but the entire area was recognized as the Pike. A landfill was heaped up near the edge of the Pike by a dredging operation in 1965 when Long Beach started to clean up the harbor. The Pike was quickly removed from the shore. In 1979, a man who owned a grill restaurant in the Pike’s Fun Zone told The Times that they destroyed business by pushing the beach back so far.
California
Palm trees are recognized as the symbol for Los Angeles. Numerous people are nearing the end of their lives.
By 1967, a columnist at the Long Beach Independent had to defend his town to an anonymous letter writer demanding an expose of Long Beach s gay bars and brothels, including the Pike, that nightmare alley with its rock-bottom characters and perverts in plain view The columnist s retort was valiant but rather weak sauce: There are only three gay bars in Long Beach down from nine two years before. At the notorious hotel occupied by prostitutes, there was only one arrest there in the last six months.
In 1979 the city had big plans that did not include the Pike. Nu-Pike May Be No Pike, ran The Times headline. There was no renewal of leases. Attractions that hadn t already fallen down were knocked down.
(A small museum of Pike artifacts survived in the Lite-A-Line game arcade in Long Beach, operated by the Looff family, which had run the same attraction at the Pike for decades. But even that closed, in 2022.)
By 1979, too, one of the Pike s foremost attractions was already gone, first to the L.A. County coroner s office, and then to a graveyard in Oklahoma.
In 1976, a wax dummy painted Day-Glo red was being moved around in the Laff in the Dark attraction when an arm fell off. Underneath was not more wax, but a human bone. The dummy was a mummy the desiccated corpse of Elmer McCurdy.
McCurdy was a B-list, turn-of-the-century outlaw, a ne er-do-well train robber who was so lousy at his craft that he held up virtually empty trains instead of the gold-toting ones he thought he was targeting.
He once blew up a train s safe that was full of loot, but the bang fused all of the coins to the safe s inside walls. He was shot down by a sheriff s posse in Oklahoma in 1911. After that, his unclaimed body began its wanderings: as a greeter for an Oklahoma funeral home, as a sideshow attraction for touring carnivals, and even in a titillating 1933 pre-Code film,Narcotic.(It wasn t a speaking role.)
Once out of the carny racket, McCurdy became more famous in death than he had been in life. Times columnist Steve Harvey christened him the King Tut of the Tumbleweeds. McCurdy s post-posthumous credits: a BBC documentary, two biographies, a Celtic folk song, and a murder mystery weekend. He was buried in ahistoric cemetery in Guthrie, Okla.under a two-foot layer of concrete, lest anyone be tempted to take him on tour again.
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
The city of Los Angeles is complicated. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
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