The Pier: Rebuilt After Every Storm
Near Old Orchard Beach, Maine
Look out at the pier stretching over the Atlantic, and you are looking at the heart of Old Orchard Beach. The first pier opened here on the second of July, eighteen ninety-eight, and it was a marvel. Built of steel by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company of Connecticut, it cost thirty-eight thousand dollars and reached somewhere close to one thousand eight hundred feet out over the water.
At the ceremony, boosters called it the longest steel pier in the world. Out at its ocean end stood a grand casino, a ballroom said to hold something like five thousand dancers, where crowds came to waltz, hear concerts, and listen to lectures with the surf breaking beneath their feet. The sea had other plans.
That very November, a storm damaged the pier and its casino. A fire in nineteen oh seven burned the pier entrance. A great storm in the spring of nineteen oh nine tore away a pavilion and shortened the structure.
Sources disagree on the exact footage lost, but the pattern is plain. Again and again, wind, wave, and flame chewed the pier back, and again and again the town rebuilt it. Through the nineteen twenties and thirties, the casino ballroom became one of New England's great dance halls.
Guy Lombardo played here. So did Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Xavier Cugat, and a young Frank Sinatra. Then came the reckoning.
A fire in nineteen sixty-nine destroyed pier amusements, and the old casino was pulled down in nineteen seventy. The final blow arrived with the historic blizzard of February nineteen seventy-eight, one of the worst nor'easters ever to strike New England. Its tides ran feet above normal, and it destroyed what little of the pier remained.
Two years later, in nineteen eighty, the town rebuilt once more, this time a shorter pier reaching about five hundred feet into the sea, lined with the shops and food stands you pass today. So the pier near you is not the original. It is the latest in a long line, each one raised again after the ocean took the last.
That stubbornness, rebuilding after every storm, is the truest story of this town.
