Few people deserve more credit for saving the Santa Monica Pier from demolition and keeping it free and accessible for millions of people to visit every year than Judy Abdo and Larry Barber.
The pair received the inaugural Santa Monica Pier Awards for their advocacy during the Santa Monica Pier Corporation’s “PIERfect Benefit” fundraiser on Sept. 6 at the historic Merry Go-Round building on the pier. The Santa Monica Pier Corporation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and enhancing the pier through year-round programming, including concerts, festivals and historical presentations. The money raised from the benefit will support the organization's continued production of free public events. “I have been a part of so many wonderful events at the Pier for the past several decades, but this one simple afternoon at the Merry Go-Round is easily the most memorable, touching and meaningful event throughout all of my time here,” executive director Jim Harris said.
Harris added that the event also helped the Pier Corporation change public perception that it is not a branch of the city of Santa Monica, but instead depends entirely on donations to continue putting on free events and making the pier a world-class destination. For the first time this year, the Pier Corporation will bus 200 children from underserved communities to spend a free day at the pier. Harris said that Abdo and Barber played important roles in making the pier what it is today.
“For fifteen years I have dreamed of hosting an event such as this, and for every one of those years I have known that the two best inaugural honorees for the Santa Monica Pier Award had to be Larry Barber and Judy Abdo,” Harris said. “The pier stands today because of the efforts of Larry and the many others who literally saved the pier from demolition. And the Pier is open and available to all people at no cost today because of Judy’s advocacy.”
The event was attended by Santa Monica Mayor Lana Negrete and State Sen. Ben Allen, along with members of the Santa Monica City Council. Abdo and Barber were both presented with State of California-issued commendations at the event.
“What makes the pier so special is it belongs to everyone,” Negrete said in a speech at the event. “People come from all over the world to walk out over the water, to fish or sit on a bench and watch the sunset or the sunrise. And for locals, like me and many of you, it’s also where we come to be reminded how lucky we are to call this place home.”
In 1973, the Santa Monica City Council approved a motion to demolish the pier. Barber, while working as a cook at Al’s Kitchen on the pier, rallied customers and coworkers together as part of Friends of the Santa Monica Pier to save the pier from demolition.
“These people who worked at the restaurant, all their surfer friends and people who would come down there to get in the ocean and swim and surf and do all those things, everybody got excited and was willing to come out and show how they felt to the council – when that was a meaningful gesture,” Barber said. “So when that happened, we could feel the political momentum building in our favor, and were really seeing the shared experience that we were having together lifted us all up, sort of as one somehow.”
As chair of Friends of the Santa Monica Pier, Barber served as spokesperson while the group organized members of the community to speak out and convince the City Council to save the pier, including at a well known meeting in January 1973, where more than a thousand people gathered at the Civic Auditorium to protest a City Council proposal to demolish the pier and create a manmade island.
Though Barber was presented with the award, he said his Friends of the Santa Monica Pier colleagues at the time deserve it just as much, including Jack Sikking, Joane Crowne, Maynard and Sheila Ostrow, Pat Lennon and Julie Stone.
“I’m getting the award, but it's really Friends of the Santa Monica Pier that was really the recipient of that award,” he added.
Judy Abdo, a former teacher who went on to become the first out-lesbian Mayor of Santa Monica, served as an original board member of the Santa Monica Pier Corporation, then the Santa Monica Pier Restoration Corporation. In 1983, a storm damaged significant sections of the pier. In the aftermath, Abdo fought to restore the pier and also keep it free and accessible to the public amid proposals to charge people for entry.
“That’s not what the pier is about. The pier is about everybody being able to go there anytime they want,” Abdo said. “So many people come to the United States, to L.A., to Santa Monica knowing that the pier is here and they want to go visit it because it’s a famous place. And to have the idea out there that you have to pay to go in to see this fabulous place would be wrong.”
Abdo said that even though she received the award, other pier advocates also deserve recognition, including the founder of the Santa Monica Pier Corporation and former Santa Monica Mayor Ruth Goldway, former board member Nancy Greenstein and Ernie Powell.
Growing up and visiting the pier since before the age of ten, Abdo stressed the importance of the work of the Pier Corporation in raising money for the pier’s future and longevity. In receiving the award, she said she hopes people realize the importance of a free and accessible pier.
“It wasn’t about me,” she said. “It was about the pier.”
Barber also said the pier’s preservation is as important today as it was when he fought more than fifty years ago to save it.
“I tried to convey the idea that there was a certain magic that the pier encapsulated somehow,” Barber said. “When you come to the pier, you leave the shoreline a little bit, and you walk out, and you’re sort of with the water, with the sunlight when it’s the daytime, with the clouds – you’re in a place where the elements come together, and the water, the clouds and the way the sun is shining is always changing, and it’s reshaping all the time. The waves are constantly coming to the shore. The surface of the water is never the same. And so sometimes you might arrive there a little out of shape yourself and the way you’d like to feel your best self, because the things that have happened in your day take little bites out of you somehow. And you kind of need to be reshaped yourself. When you’re out there in the elements, all of those elements somehow enable you to recapture that best sense of yourself.”
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By SAM MULICK