It opened for business on the Fourth of July, 1927, to flags, fanfare, and fireworks and was a massive success. And why not. It was a beautifully simple, hedonistic idea-combine the beauty of the ocean and the beach with women in “bathing costumes,” junk food, and then the nocturnal Roaring Twenties pleasures of illegal booze, jazz, and dancing, with sex to follow at the beachside hotels that sprang up around the pier.
All good, except that Earl and Earnest forgot to creosote the pilings that supported the pier, and “water-born parasites” started eating the thing. (The uncharitable would have it that water-born parasites-that is, surf bums- still infest Pacific Beach.) Pickering's Pleasure Pier started crumbling into the ocean and, a year after opening, had to be closed for safety purposes. The party was over.
Truly, because with exquisite Pacific Beach timing, the town had reinvigorated itself just in time for the Great Depression.
The tents went up again, but the Depression wasn't as severe in San Diego as it was in a lot of the country, because the navy base in the harbor cushioned the unemployment. And a lot of people loved Pacific Beach in those years for precisely what it didn't have: a lot of people, houses, traffic. They loved it precisely because it was a sleepy, friendly little town with one of the best stretches of beach in these United States, and the beach was free and accessible to everyone, and there were no hotels or condo complexes, no private drives.
What changed Pacific Beach forever was a nose.
Dorothy Fleet's sensitive nose, to be exact.
In 1935, her husband, Reuben, owned a company called Consolidated Aircraft, which had a contract with the U.S. government to design and build seaplanes. The problem was that Consolidated was located in Buffalo, and it was hard to land seaplanes on water that was usually ice. So Reuben decided to move the company to warm and sunny California, and he gave his wife, Dorothy, a choice between San Diego and Long Beach. Dorothy didn't like Long Beach because of the “smelly oil wells” nearby, so she picked San Diego, and Fleet built his factory on a site near the airport, where he and his eight hundred workers came out with the great PBY Catalina.
Airplanes had a lot to do with creating modern Pacific Beach, because Japanese bombers hitting Pearl Harbor launched the Consolidated factory into high gear. Suddenly faced with the job of producing thousands of PBYs plus the new B-24 bomber, Fleet imported thousands of workers- 15,000 by early 1942, 45,000 by the war's end. Working 24/7 they pumped out 33,000 aircraft during the war.
They had to live somewhere, and the nearby empty flats of Pacific Beach made the perfect location to put up quick, cheap housing.
And it wasn't just Consolidated Aircraft, for San Diego became the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet, and between the navy bases around San Diego Harbor and the marine training bases at Elliott and Pendleton, up by Oceanside, the whole area became a military town. The city's population jumped from 200,000 in 1941 to 500,000 by 1943. The government built a number of housing projects in Pacific Beach-Bayview Terrace, Los Altos, Cyanne- and a lot of the men and women who came to live in them temporarily never went home. A lot of the sailors and marines who were stationed in San Diego on their way to and from the Pacific front decided to come back and build lives there.
Much of PB, especially inland from the beach, still has that blue-and-khaki-collar mentality-unlike its tonier neighbor to the north, La Jolla- and a fiercely egalitarian ethic that is a holdover from the close-living, pooled ration card, and backyard party days of the war. Notoriously casual, PB residents aren't at all bothered by the fact that two of their major streets are actually misspelled: Felspar should be Feldspar and Hornblend should be Hornblende, but nobody cares, if they even know. (So much for the San Diego College of Letters.) Nobody seems to know why the major east-west streets were named after precious stones in the first place, except that it seemed to be some kind of lame effort to suggest that PB was the gem of the West Coast. And you know a PB locie by the way he or she pronounces Garnet Avenue. If they say it correctly-“Garnet”- you know right away they're from out of town, because the locals all mispronounce it, saying “Garnette.”
Anyway, if you drive west on Garnet, however the hell you say it, you're going to run into Pickering's old Pleasure Pier, renamed Crystal Pier, another PB landmark revived by the PBY and B-24. The midway is gone, and so is the dance hall, replaced by the white cottages with blue shutters that line the north and south edges of the pier, then give way to empty space for fishermen who have been known to hook the occasional surfer trying to shoot the pilings.
But the concept of pleasure remains.
PB is the only beach in California where you can still drink on the sand. Between noon and eight p.m., you can slam booze on the beach, and for that reason PB had become Party Town, USA, Beach Division. The party is always on, at the beach, along the boardwalk, in the bars and clubs that line Garnet between Mission and Ingraham.
You've got Moondoggies, the PB Bar amp; Grill, the Tavern, the Typhoon Saloon, and of course, The Sundowner. On weekend nights-or any nights in the summer, spring, or fall-Garnet is rocking with a young crowd, many of them locals, a lot of them tourists who've heard about the party all the way from Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, Japan, and Australia. You've got a drunk and horny United Nations General Assembly down there, and the bartenders on Garnet have probably done more for world peace than any ambassador ever double-parked outside Tiffany's.
Yeah, except that something different has been creeping up the past few years as gangs from other parts of the city have been drawn to the PB nightlife, and fights have broken out in the clubs and on the street.
It's a shame, Boone thinks as he drives past the strip of nightclubs and bars, that the laid-back surfer atmosphere is giving way to alcohol- and gang-fueled rage, scuffles in bars that turn into fights in the streets outside.
It's weird-where you used to see signs that readNO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE and might just as well have added and no enforcement, now you see signs in the club doorways banning gang colors, hats, hooded sweatshirts, and any gang-related gear.
PB is getting a seedy, almost dangerous reputation, and the family tourist trade is starting to move to Mission Beach or up to Del Mar, leaving PB to the young and single, to the booze hounds and the gang bangers, and it's all too bad.
Boone has never much liked change anyway, certainly not this change. But PB has changed, even from the time Boone was growing up in it. He saw it explode in the Reagan eighties. A hundred years after its first real estate boom, Pacific Beach hit another one. But this time it wasn't lots of land for little one-story cottages; this time it was condo complexes and big hotels that bulldozed the little cottages into memories and robbed the few survivors of their sunlight and ocean views. And with the condos, the chain stores moved in, so a lot of Pacific Beach looks like a lot of everywhere else, and the small businesses that gave the place its charm-like The Sundowner and Koana's Coffee-are now exceptions.
And prices continued to rise, to the point where the average working person, the man or woman who built the town, can't even think about buying a place anywhere near the beach and will soon be priced out of the market entirely-threatening to turn the beachfront area into that weird dichotomy of a rich person's ghetto, where the rich lock themselves inside at night when the streets are taken over by drunk tourists and predatory gangs.
Now Boone drives east on Garnet, past all the clubs and bars and into the area of coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, tattoo parlors, palm-reading joints, used-clothing stores, and fast-food restaurants, then into the mostly residential neighborhood of the flats. He crosses the 5, where Garnet becomes Balboa Avenue, and pulls into the parking lot of Triple A Taxi.
Just around the corner from the old Consolidated Aircraft factory, where Reuben Fleet won the war and Pacific Beach got lost.
18
The taxi office is a small, formerly white clapboard building in need of a paint job. A metal security screen is open, revealing the company logo stenciled in fading red on the front window. Off to the left is a garage, where a taxi is up on a rack. Another half a dozen cabs are parked haphazardly around the parking lot.
“Wait in the van, okay?” Boone says as he turns off the engine.
“And flirt with hepatitis C for what reason?” Petra asks.
“Just stay in the van,” Boone says, “and try to look aggro.”
