The Looff Hippodrome: Where the Pier Got Its Soul

The building beside you is one of the oldest surviving amusement structures on the West Coast, and it was built by a man who made joy his life's work.

Charles I.D. Looff was a Danish immigrant who had already built the very first carousel at Coney Island in eighteen seventy-six before he turned his attention to the Pacific. In nineteen sixteen he opened a brand-new amusement pier right next to the existing Santa Monica Pier, and at its heart he placed a carousel of his own design inside a building that borrowed from Byzantine palaces and Moorish temples. He called it the Hippodrome, the ancient Greek word for a horse-racing stadium, because that is what a carousel was, in miniature: a track, a set of horses, a crowd of spectators thrilled by motion.

The building opened on June twelfth, nineteen sixteen, and children loved it so completely that workers added a whole extra row of horses just to keep up with demand. Looff himself died in nineteen eighteen, barely two years after his Hippodrome debuted.

The original carousel was sold off in nineteen thirty-nine, and by nineteen forty-seven the building held a replacement, a Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel that had originally been built in nineteen twenty-two for nearby Venice Pier. That second carousel is still here today, still turning, still playing its music over the sound of the surf.

In nineteen eighty-seven the Hippodrome was declared a National Historic Landmark. It is, by some measures, the only National Historic Landmark that doubles as a working ride.

The building survived earthquakes, fires, changing ownership, and the kind of casual neglect that has taken down dozens of other pier structures up and down the California coast. What saved it was essentially the same thing that saved Looff's original vision: people kept showing up, feeding quarters into the machine, reaching for the brass ring.