Crews demolish historic Monterey Bay pier, in danger of collapse after January storm damage

In the final chapter for one of the most venerable landmarks along Monterey Bay, crews with excavators and other heavy equipment on Monday tore apart the 500-foot-long wooden pier at Seacliff State Beach in Aptos.

Popular with generations of beachgoers and anglers, the pier, built in 1930, was best known as the connection between sweeping sandy beaches of Santa Cruz County and the SS Palo Alto, a Word War I-era steamship widely called the “cement ship.”

The wooden pier was severely damaged by huge waves during storms on Jan. 5, and was in imminent danger of collapse, state parks officials said. President Biden visited it as part of his trip to California on Jan. 19 to survey the damage and issue disaster declarations.

As excavators ripped apart the wooden decking Monday, crowds of tourists and locals gathered to take photographs and talk about the demolition.

“This is a symbol of our community,” said Mando Morlos, a Corralitos wedding photographer who fished for halibut and salmon from the pier when he was a boy, and wants to see it rebuilt. “It’s on postcards. It’s printed on our T-shirts. There’s almost nobody alive who remembers what it was like before it was here.”

State Parks leaders said public meetings will begin this summer to plan whether another pier will be built in the same spot. Other facilities at Seacliff also suffered major damage in the storms.

“It was the combination of a very big swell and a high tide,”  said Chris Spohrer, superintendent for the Santa Cruz District of state parks. “We lost half of the pier. And the damage to the campground was catastrophic. It was a complete loss.”

The Seacliff campground featured 63 spots for RVs. Only feet from the sand, it was among the most popular campgrounds at any state park in California, usually booked full every day of the year by visitors from across the United States.

When the atmospheric river storm roared in, Spohrer was at the beach. He supervised the evacuation of visitors the day before.

“The whole thing happened in like an hour-and-a-half,” he said. “It was surreal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen waves like that. There were 20-foot waves breaking through here, blowing the doors off the restroom building and washing across the campground.”

State parks across Santa Cruz County suffered at least $40 million in damage, he said, a number that is expected to go higher as damage reports are finalized.

Spohrer has been no stranger to weather-related disasters in recent years. Three years ago, nearly all of Big Basin Redwoods State Park burned, including campgrounds, ranger homes and the historic park headquarters building, in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire. Big Basin has reopened, but it will be several years before facilities there are reconstructed.

At Seacliff, Spohrer said, dates for public planning meetings will be announced soon, with events held in the summer, and a plan finished within a year. Depending on what new facilities are built, construction will likely begin in 2024 or 2025, he said.

Until then, Seacliff State Park is open. On Monday, people walked along the beaches, and watched the demolition work from the bluffs.

Crews will have all the pier’s decking removed by the end of this week, said Don Lawson, with Granite Construction, the contractor for the job. After that, he said, they will dig down 6 feet into the sand around each wooden piling, and saw it off, then cover the hole back up. Diving crews will do the same with the underwater pilings.

The entire job, which began last Monday, is expected to be finished by the end of April. The wood, Douglas Fir that was covered generations ago by creosote, a type of coal tar that can cause skin irritations, is being taken to a landfill in Marina, he said.

“It’s sad it’s going away,” Lawson said. “A lot of people have come up to us and said, ‘Can I get a little piece of it?’ But we have to tell them no because of the creosote.”

The cement ship is one of Monterey Bay’s oldest oceanfront tourist attractions, along with the Santa Cruz Wharf, the Beach Boardwalk amusement park and Cannery Row in Monterey.

“It’s the punctuation mark,” said Sandy Lydon, a prominent Central Coast historian. “If you see a map or an aerial photograph of Monterey Bay, and how it hooks around, it’s like an arrow that was shot right into the coast and is sticking out.”

The 500-foot-long wooden fishing pier was built out to the vessel. It was converted into a tourist destination with a big neon sign. Top big bands like Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman and Tommy Dorsey’s orchestras played at the ship’s Rainbow Ballroom with its white ash dance floor. There was a restaurant called the Fish Palace and a heated swimming pool. Bingo games and slot machines were on the deck, and as rumor has it, Prohibition-era gambling below.

But the Depression ruined the promoters’ big dreams. The ship was damaged by storms, the company went bankrupt, and the California state parks department bought the ship in 1936 for $1.

For decades, the public was allowed to wander out onto its decks.

“The ship moaned,” recalled Lydon, who fished there in the 1950s as a boy. “The waves would come in and compress the air in those old oil tanks and force it out through holes in the deck. It had this incredible sound. It would sing. But it was a sad song. It was almost like it was alive. Every once in a while the water would come through the deck and spout through the air.”

As time, thousand of birds and the sea degraded it, the ship eventually was closed in 2001. It rolled over and broke apart in big storms in 2017. Spohrer said there are no plans to remove the old vessel, which is now covered in starfish, urchins and other sea life.

“It’s become part of the marine habitat,” he said.