Santa Monica Pier

A hundred and fifty years old, and taller than it has ever been.

The pier is the reason there's anything to do in Santa Monica, and the reason is jurisdictional rather than scenic. The district's boards govern land — tenancies, rents, use, the things a city council does. The pier is a timber and concrete structure standing in water that was closed by a hazard cordon in 2056, which means it is not land, not inside the cordon's own remit, and not anybody's to zone.

So it got built on. Nobody could give permission and nobody could refuse it, which in this city is the same as an invitation.

Why a pier over poisoned water is worth anything

The water is the point and you never touch it. What people pay for is being above an ocean in a city where the ocean is fenced off — the only place on this coast you can stand over water, at a rail, and look at it.

Which means the whole structure is about air, not water. Standing over the Tide puts you in the worst air in the district: it comes off the surface, it's worse on a west wind, and being four hundred feet out means being in it rather than downwind of it. So everything built here since the 2040s is sealed — fixed glazing, gasketed doors, filtration running on the tenants' own power, and positive pressure so the leak goes outward.

That's the actual product. Not a view: a view with clean air in front of it. You can stand at a wall of glass with the ocean six feet away and breathe, which is available nowhere else on this coastline, and people will pay a great deal for two hours of it. Corporate staff on rotation get shown it on the company's money. Pueblo day-permit visitors come for the things their Council won't license and stay for the glass. Angelenos come because it's the ocean and it's theirs and this is the only way to have it.

The old open deck is weather-dependent and everybody plans around that. There's a board at the Colorado end with the day's wind on it, the same way other cities post a forecast. Good wind and the deck is full and the carousel is running with its doors open. Bad wind and the outside is empty, the sealed levels are packed, and the prices go up.

The three decks

The old deck, 1909 and repeatedly rebuilt, and open to the air — the Hippodrome and its carousel, food, the legitimate businesses, the amusements a family from Pico comes for on a Sunday. The Hippodrome itself is a building, so it got glazed and gasketed early and runs on bad-wind days when everything around it doesn't. This is the level the boards have never contested.

Two decks above it, added in pieces from the 2040s out of light steel, fixed glass and whatever else was to hand: sealed rooms, walkways between them, stairs bolted on the outside for anybody willing to be in the air for thirty seconds. This is where the trade is — clinics, chip shops, offices, the back-room tables, the talismongers. Every one of them runs its own filtration, which is why the upper decks hum, and why the roofline is a mess of intakes and stacks. It looks like what it is: a district built upward by people who each solved their own problem twice, once for space and once for air.

Below that, sealed. The substructure is skirted and plated off, because what's down there is contaminated water and the piles standing in it. The only way to the sand is the stairs at the far end, which are gated, and where the small trade happens.

The part everybody knows and nobody says

It is carrying about three times what it was built for, over water that eats steel. Piles get inspected by people the promoters and tenants pay privately, patched, sleeved and re-sleeved. There are two closed sections on the old deck with fencing round them and a third that should be. This is why only half of it was ever rebuilt — not because trade wouldn't support more, but because the engineering wouldn't.

Nobody who works there will discuss it with you and everybody knows which bays to keep off.

What the crew knows

• This is the most-watched structure in the district, because it's the way down to a cordoned beach and everybody understands that. Patrol attention, resident cameras, and a district with a reason to keep an eye on it.
• Which means: no boats. People propose it constantly. Bringing a hull in under this deck is the loudest thing you could do with a boat in Los Angeles. That trade happens twenty-eight miles south along empty cordoned coast — see the beach cities.
• And no fights. They need floor, seating and somewhere to hold money. The Coliseum does the cards, and it's a real business with books.
• Up is private, down is watched. The upper decks are sealed rooms with gasketed doors and no authority entitled to open them. That's the actual value of the place and it's why an unlicensed clinic is on the third level rather than the sand.
• Filtration is the utility that matters here, the way water is the utility in a stack. Every room has its own, they're maintained privately and badly, and a tenant whose plant fails is out of business the same afternoon. Somebody on this pier makes a living entirely from filter cartridges and is doing better than most of the tenants.
• Holding a door open is a threat, and everybody understands it as one. Positive pressure only works while the room is shut. Nobody draws in a sealed room on a bad-wind day — they stand in the doorway, which is worse and takes longer.
• The seaward end is where the serious business sits, because it has one approach and the longest sightline of anybody coming.
• Two bays on the old deck are fenced off and a third is worse than the fenced ones. Ask a vendor which and they'll tell you; ask a manager and they won't.
• The tube from Santa Monica Place is how you actually get here, and it is one way in and one way out with both ends watched. Worth knowing before you need to leave in a hurry.
• The unlicensed trade inventory is on Santa Monica, which lists what's actually for sale here.

Getting in

Almost nobody arrives on the deck any more, and on a bad-wind day nobody sane does. The way in is Santa Monica Place — the old mall at Broadway and Second, sealed and filtered in the 2040s the same way everything else here was, because a shopping centre already had the plant for it. Park inside, and take the tube: a glazed, gasketed pedestrian passage that runs from the mall down Colorado, over the highway and out onto the pier's second level without ever putting you in the air.

It's four hundred yards of glass with the ocean on one side and the closed beach on the other, moving walkways that work about half the time, and vendors along it who pay rent to somebody. The tube is the pier's front door, its busiest retail, and its one genuine chokepoint — one way in, one way out, sealed at both ends, and both ends are watched.

For everything else the pier is a vertical problem. The upper decks are reached by exterior stairs that tenants control, which means thirty seconds in the air each way, which means nobody uses them casually and anybody who does is noticed. The two useful ones don't appear on any of the pier's own maps, because they were added by whoever owned the room at the top. And the gated stairs to the sand at the far end are the only way down — used at night, they are the single most reliable way here to attract the patrol.

Walking on at the Colorado end is still possible and still public. It's also open-air the whole way, so on a good-wind day it's a pleasant approach and on a bad one it marks you as somebody who either doesn't know or can't afford the tube.