History Lesson:
The San Clemente Pier
By Christine Lampert, Architect, AJA, NCARB
Ole Hanson, the founder of San Clemente, built the pier and then gave it back to the community as a gift. The pier was a great place for locals and visitors to fish and to enjoy the ocean.
For years, the San Clemente Pier was the main fishing pier in the area with boats docking alongside for loading passengers. It was the place to catch a boat in South Orange County until 1971 when the Dana Point Marina was built.
The San Clemente Pier was once the center of illegal smuggling. When the pier was built in 1928, a prohibition law that forbade the sale of alcohol in the United States was in place. The 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution made the sale of alcohol illegal; it was repealed by the 21st amendment in 1933. Liquor was smuggled into the United States and sold in secret bars which were called “speakeasies.” The San Clemente Pier had a hidden hatch under the snack bar at the end of the pier where alcohol was brought in by boats at night and delivered to speakeasies in the area.
The local coast was very isolated and undeveloped in the 1920s San Clemente was the perfect place to bring in secret contraband in the middle of the night. Ships brought the liquor up the coast and transported it onto smaller boats, which would bring it into San Clemente and other locations along the coast.
The pier has barely weathered some major storms over the years. In the winter of 1939, a huge storm took away most of the pier and it had to be rebuilt. The storm scattered pings and debris from the pier as far away as Dana Point. It happened again in 1983 with an El Nino storm. This time, the city fire department anticipated the storm and they came onto the pier the day before and hacked away an 80 foot section to try to save the restaurant at the base. That night, waves washed over the entire pier, and even though a large section of the end of the pier was ripped away, the restaurant survived.
It took almost two years and $1.4 million dollars to rebuild the old wood pier, which was reconstructed with steel reinforcement to better protect it from the next storm. The next storm came in 1989, and this time the pier survived with less damage.
For years, a small shock at the end of the pier sold fishing bait and snacks. At the base of the pier was the boat storage for the local fishing club, In the 1970s, the boat storage facilities were remodeled into Fisherman’s Restaurant & Bar.
The original pier was 1,200 feet long, but when it was rebuilt, it gained 96 feet and it is now 1,296 feet long-almost a quarter-mile.
Today, Orange County is home to only five piers: San Clemente, Balboa, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, and Seal Beach
