This past week, Q-line asked: How do you envision the Santa Monica Pier in the future?
Here are your responses: ✆ “I envision a Santa Monica Pier with an expanded parking lot — southwest, over the ocean — to facilitate an additional 100 motor vehicles, and a better access route from Ocean Avenue to the lower parking lot that sits north of the pier. Still, if residents continue to move from the Santa Monica coastal area due to high prices, this expansion may prove to be moot.” ✆ “The pier of the future, like Santa Monica as a whole, will continue to go downhill. There is no one with any real intelligence and insight to stop this downward flow. Good-bye, lovely Santa Monica of yesteryear.” ✆ “Well, I think that the pier is a wonderful place. It draws a lot of celebrity clients from around the world. I say, ‘Go for it.’ A lot of entertainment is the happening thing. So I say, ‘Let’s go for it.’” ✆ “Ban the street performers from the Santa Monica Pier — now, and in the future. If the street performers wish a venue, give them the venue of choice — Venice Beach — not the Santa Monica Pier. Also, with regard to the type of pier we should have in the future, I think it should be for enjoyment by all, but at the same time, I strongly feel that you have to remember that a lot of the people who are walking the pier are tourists from all over the globe, whether it be Asia, Europe or wherever. And in consideration of these folks who are paying top dollar, very top dollar at the hotels in Santa Monica, they should be given some ‘medium’ type of entertainment like that which the restaurants, etc., can provide currently. But again, no street performers — all it does is clog and annoy.” ✆ “I see the pier as pretty much remaining the same. It should have some games and a little bit of fun there and food, for the tourists and the locals, and have some concerts and stuff like it does. I think that it’s pretty much topped out as far as what it does and how it provides for the community and the other communities at large. I don’t see the sense in having Third Street performers come over on the pier and ruin it for everybody by every four feet having a different kind of beat and jangles and tunes and words going on like crazy. I appreciate that it was not allowed and I don’t think it should be. As far as traveling up and down the pier, I do think that an electric elevator taking people who are disabled from the top of the pier to bottom of the pier and back up for a fee of 25 or 50 cents would be a nice addition.” ✆ “About the pier — East Los Angeles, West.” ✆ “Well, with the Santa Monica City Council being the way it is, the pier will probably be crawling with bums in the near future unless the Bush administration trashes the environment and global warming puts it underwater.” ✆ “I think that the pier would be really nice if there were some nice restaurants with really good seafood, and not sort of, as expensive as The Lobster. Something like a fish market with really good fried fish or broiled fish, but not exorbitantly expansive, where everybody can go and take their families, and other nice restaurants, not chain restaurants, but individual seafood restaurants. With less of the circus atmosphere, it’d be something really nice.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 27, 2004. Read the original PDF.