The Pismo Beach Pier

The Pismo Beach Pier reaches out over the surf where the town has met the ocean for well over a century. The first structure here was not a pleasure pier but a working wharf, opened in eighteen eighty-one by the Meherin brothers, Arroyo Grande merchants who wanted to ship local lumber and produce without paying steep freight fees. The sea was a hard landlord.

A storm in December of eighteen eighty-four tore some two hundred fifty feet off the wharf, and in January of nineteen oh four another storm collapsed a hundred feet of it into the waves. By nineteen oh five little remained but a line of pilings across the sand. The pier as locals picture it was born in the nineteen twenties, when a new company built a longer structure a couple of blocks south of the original.

Old timers still recall driving cars out along its length and turning around at the far end. Fierce storms in nineteen eighty-three shattered much of it again, and a rebuilt pier with its familiar diamond railings followed. After a full reconstruction that swapped timber for steel pilings, the pier reopened to the public in October of two thousand eighteen.

Fishermen, surfers, and sunset watchers have crowded these rails through every version of it.