Santa Monica Pier
The Santa Monica Pier starts where Colorado Avenue runs out of land. Walk past the entry arch and you're on a hundred-year-old concrete deck extending 1,600 feet over the Pacific — originally built, without romance, to carry sewer pipes beyond the breakers. That unglamorous origin is worth keeping in mind as you pass the Ferris wheel turning against the sky.
What's here now is a layered thing: a 1916 carousel still spinning 44 hand-carved horses inside a Moorish-Byzantine hippodrome, a solar-powered amusement park, an aquarium run by an environmental non-profit, and the western terminus of Route 66 marked by a modest sign most people walk past.
💛 What travellers fall for
Regulars tend to time the carousel over Pacific Park — the Looff Hippodrome is quieter, the horses are the real thing, and the $8 ride ticket is the same price as a single Pacific Park attraction. The aquarium below the pier, run by Heal the Bay, is genuinely worth the $12 if you have any interest in what lives in the water beneath your feet.
Deals in Santa Monica Pier
Book directly at the provider
How Santa Monica Pier came to be
The Municipal Pier opened on September 9, 1909, built to solve a sewage problem. Seven years later, carousel builder Charles Looff — the man who put Coney Island's first carousel on the Brooklyn waterfront in 1876 — arrived with his son Arthur and constructed the Pleasure Pier alongside it. The Looff Hippodrome went up in 1916; the Philadelphia Toboggan Company installed its carousel inside in 1922, and those 44 horses are still turning.
By the 1970s the pier had decayed enough that the city voted to demolish it. A citizen campaign called Save Santa Monica Bay reversed that decision in 1973. Storms in 1983 caused serious structural damage, but the pier was rebuilt rather than abandoned. Pacific Park opened in 1996, the first amusement operation on the pier since 1930. The Hippodrome is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.