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by
Khassaundra Delgado
. It is a beach of clear, aqua-hued water, soft, sandy shores, and a stunning pier that resembles a circus or county fair. A Ferris wheel towers over the ocean’s depths, its red, blue and green lights sparkling. The smell of popcorn and cotton candy wafts through the air, mixing with the salty scent of the ocean breeze. Twenty-foot waves crash against the sand, breaking violently and retreating: a surfer’s Mecca. This is the Coney Island of the West, the Waikiki of California. This is Long Beach, California before World War Two. Before the breakwater was built, b efore everything changed.
This idyllic beach exists now only in the anecdotes of old surfers. In fact, even its historical reality is in dispute. Postcards and photographs from the 1930s show beaches packed with bodies, surfers, and crystal clear waves. The breakwater — a roughly 2.25 mile wall of man-made rock and sediment — lies just off the coast across from Ocean Avenue, between North Redondo and Orizaba Avenues. Its construction was a turning point in the natural environment and social habitat of Long Beach. Combined with the adjacent San Pedro and Middle breakwaters, this undersea wall constitutes the largest man-made breakwater in the world. Now, more than fifty years later, the city faces another turning point: what should be done about it, if anything?
The breakwater itself is a 60-foot wall composed of rock, sediment, and cement beneath the ocean. Its rocky crest peeks out slightly above the surface, creating a shadowy, onyx line against the sprawling horizon. From an aerial view, it looks like nothing more than a pale gray line in the ocean. It extends deep under the sea, preventing waves and fresh ocean water from penetrating the beachfront area, a wall that keeps nature out and harbors the mechanized municipality, protecting its interests.
The Army Corps of Engineers began construction on the breakwater in 1941 and completed it eight years later. Its original purpose at that time of international conflict, and just after the bombing of the American naval base at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, was to protect the Long Beach Naval Base from submarines, torpedoes, and wave erosion. When the naval base closed fifty-five years later, the beach facing the breakwater remained largely untended . Instead, the waters are a gateway for commerce via the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the largest ports in the United States. These ports bring in goods from Asia — namely Japan and China— and distribute them to the rest of the country. The Long Beach port is a critical economic enterprise for the city. In 2006 ,the Port of Long Beach processed approximately $140 million dollars in U.S.-international trade. It sits at the mouth of the Los Angeles River, a contaminated entity that dumps trash into the waters of Long Beach. Since the building of the breakwater, Long B each has perceived itself as a military, industrial and commercial port rather than a recreational destination, and the city has focused little attention on the state of its formerly pristine beaches. The result is beaches that are considered inhospitable coastal wastelands.
The removal of the breakwater in its entirety is unlikely. Long Beach is no longer a surfer’s dream, if it ever really was. It is a city with an industrial, rather than beachside environment. The two cannot coexist. One must, and indeed always does, dominate the other. The city’s shift from a natural environment to a man-made industrial habitat has had a profound impact on social conditions. The result is a Long Beach with all its craziness, poverty, and toughness; Long Beach, at the meeting point of the state’s greatest freeways; Long Beach, with its supernaturally large port, its royalty in the form of the retired cruise ship The Queen Mary, its state university, and peninsula homes. It is Long Beach, home of the Crips street gang, birthplace of Snoop Dogg and gangster rap, Roscoe’s Chicken N’ Waffle s, and the Carmelita Housing Projects. Long Beach a city that made a deal with the devil, by sacrificing its beaches in exchange for capital provided by industry and commerce.
This was not always the case. The Long Beach surfing community reached its pinnacle during the 1930s. Oral histories and written anecdotes of its heyday are available on the Surfing Heritage Foundation’s website. They depict an exciting, relaxed, and lively beachside community. According to the archives, a legendary surf spot in the region was known as “Flood Control.” It sat at the mouth of the Los Angeles River — where the breakwater sits now — close to the dock where the Queen Mary, the former flagship of the Cunard cruise line, is now moored. According to Alex Bixeler, a surfer of the day and source in the Surfing Heritage archives, Flood Control had “famous humpers. I believe I had ridden a tidal wave.” In John C. Elwell’s Surfing in San Diego, Bixeler appears in several photographs as a young, thin man with dark hair and a wide smile. Photographs displayed in the women’s restroom of the Belmont Brewing Company, a pub and restaurant on the beach directly across from the breakwater, also show the beach in its prime. One photograph shows the pier teeming with people enjoying leisurely, seaside strolls. Another shows small children frolicking in the water, dipping their toes in the ocean. Yet another photograph proudly displays the Long Beach swim team: seven women and two men grinning proudly in their demure bathing attire. A fourth photograph shows swarms of people spilling out from under wide umbrellas to soak in the sun and enjoy the beauty of the beach.
One of the area’s fabled surfers is a man named Ed Hendricks. At 84 years old, he is one of the few remaining surfers in the region who remembers what it was like to surf in Long Beach before the breakwater was erected. He is also the Vice Chairman of the Long Beach chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, as well as a Breakwater Government Liaison. “The city of Long Beach was fortunate in that it had the best surf on the west coast,” Hendricks recalls. “There was tremendous surf; the kids loved it. The power of the breakers was quite a ways off, so by the time they got to the shore, they were safe for everybody. They were beautiful waves.”
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