Twenty-six years ago today, in January 1988, an overachieving short-period winter swell took a flying judo kick at Huntington Beach and knocked the outermost 250' of the pier into the drink. It happened around 8:30 PM, with rain and wind lashing down. The End Cafe was there one minute, gone the next. "There was a shuddering, then a 

, then the whole thing collapsed," one eyewitness said the following morning, talking to a reporter while giant chunks of debris slowed rolled around in the shorebreak. "It was ghastly." (Another eyewitness said the Cafe actually made a more stately exit, and that for awhile it floated atop the ocean "like a houseboat.") Pacific Coast Highway was closed later that day between Newport and Huntington, as water surged all the way across that flat, massive expanse of beach and fizzed across the blacktop.

Surf Ghetto, as HB was then known, took the most spectacular hit, but the storm played fair across Orange County's social strata. While evacuating his beachfront condo in South Laguna, one man said that after a huge wave bowled over the nearshore rocks it "picked up this heavy Cadillac and smashed it into my Porsche." Laguna's Main Beach Boardwalk collapsed. In San Clemente, a mini-tornado whipped across onto a San Clemente baseball field, picked a 30-foot-long wooden dugout, and dropped it in the middle of Avenida Pico, right next to the freeway, about 150 yards away.

For a structure located in a relatively benign waters of Southern California, HB Pier has long history of wave-beaten destruction and failure. The original wooden pier was destroyed by a winter storm in 1912. Its replacement—billed as "the only solid concrete pier in America"—was completed in 1914, then extended in 1930. The whole damn extension, 500-feet worth, including the window-covered Sunshine Cafe, was pulled down during the 

, the only tropical storm to ever make landfall in California. Nearly a hundred people died in that one.

The pier was again rebuilt. Another eatery was installed; eventually it was renamed the End Cafe. The Swell of 1969 left no damage, but the El Nino-jacked series of storms of early 1983 gnawed away at the pier-end pilings, until the vacated End Cafe hung flaccid over nothing but air and sea. Another big swell, and it was gone.

The 1988 damage to the pier may have been some kind of final straw for Huntington Beach officials. The Op Pro riot had taken place just 18 months earlier, the city was already deep into the planning stages for a new and revised Huntington, 

goddamn it there would be no more riots and or pier failures

. The pier was rebuilt. The T-shaped Main Street-PCH corridor, the heart of the Surf Ghetto, was plowed under and replaced by sprawling malled-out faux-Med beachfront shopping complex.

If you call what happened last summer at the US Open a "riot" then the city is batting .500. Downgrade it to a simple "melee" or a "fracas," and the city is two-for-two.

Of course, as the saying goes (it was a Gotcha ad slogan, but I chose to believe that someone said it earlier) "Nature bats last."

HUNTINGTON PIER: ABUSE AND RESURRECTION

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