The Santa Monica Pier: The End of the American Road

There is a sign at the end of this pier that reads End of the Trail. It marks the western terminus of Route Sixty-Six, the highway that John Steinbeck called the Mother Road in The Grapes of Wrath, the highway that carried the Dust Bowl migration west across two thousand four hundred miles of Depression-era America, ending here, at the Pacific, where the continent runs out.

The pier opened in nineteen oh nine, when the City of Santa Monica marched a parade from City Hall to the new deck. The carousel followed in nineteen twenty-two and the La Monica Ballroom in nineteen twenty-four. For the next several decades the pier was simultaneously a working municipal structure, a popular entertainment destination, and the symbolic destination of a country that organized itself around the idea of westward progress. The road pointed here. The country believed in the road.

Route Sixty-Six was decommissioned as a federal highway in nineteen eighty-five, after the interstate system had made it redundant. The End of the Trail sign went up in two thousand and nine, one hundred years after the pier opened, a century after it first held out its deck to the Pacific.

The carousel installed in nineteen twenty-two is a Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel, featuring forty-four hand-carved horses, housed inside the Looff Hippodrome building. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On any given afternoon, children ride it who have never heard of Route Sixty-Six, who do not know they are sitting at the end of a road that crossed a continent. The carousel turns, the horses go up and down, the Pacific moves in the same direction it always has.