Huntington Beach Pier

The Huntington Beach Pier is a municipal pier located in Huntington Beach, California. It is located at the end of Main Street, where the street continues past Pacific Coast Highway onto the beach and becomes the pier. At 1850ft in length, it is one of the longest public piers on the West Coast. (The longest is Oceanside Pier at ). The pier is above sea level. The pier is on the California Register of Historical Resources. One of the main landmarks of Huntington Beach, also known as "Surf City, USA", the pier is the center of the city's prominent beach culture. A popular meeting place for surfers, the ocean waves here are enhanced by a natural effect caused by the edge-diffraction of open ocean swells around Catalina Island, creating consistent surf year-round.HistoryThe pier was built even before Huntington Beach was an official town. At the time, the land was owned by a business called Huntington Beach Company, which decided to build a pier in 1903. It was made completely out of wood and extended into the ocean. In 1912, it was damaged for the first time by a severe storm that caused a large portion of it to plunge into the Pacific. Fortunately, the city council at the time was already considering rebuilding the pier. A $70,000 bond was approved to construct a new pier made of concrete that would be long. In 1914, the Huntington Beach Pier set a record as the longest and highest concrete pleasure pier in the United States. In 1930, the city extended the pier by and added a cafe at the end. However, this last section was not built well and was separated from the original pier by the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Although the city paved over the gap, a rare California hurricane destroyed the cafe and extended section in 1939. Reconstruction of the pier and End Cafe (what the cafe came to be called) was completed the year later.