HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO MONSTAD PIER - 100 YEARS OLD
Here’s a great article on our historic Monstad Pier. A bit long-winded, but packed with the story of how this pier helped shape Redondo’s history… possibly the most impactful historical site in the city.
A Pier Built for Fishing: The Monstad Pier at 100
For a century, one wooden pier has connected Redondo Beach to the era when sportfishing, excursion boats and offshore barges transformed the city’s waterfront.
In 2026, an easily overlooked portion of the Redondo Beach waterfront reaches a remarkable milestone. The Monstad Pier is 100 years old.
Visitors walking today's Redondo Beach Pier can easily assume that the waterfront is essentially one structure. It isn't. Hidden within the modern complex are pieces from very different periods of Redondo's history. The straight wooden pier extending seaward on the south side is the Monstad Pier, first constructed in 1926. Despite storms, fire, rebuilding and nearly a century of alterations to the surrounding waterfront, much of the historic structure remains. A City historic-resources study concluded that the Monstad Pier retains enough of its timber-pile construction and historic configuration to convey its original character.
Its survival is especially remarkable because nearly every other major pier from Redondo's early waterfront has disappeared.
And the reason the Monstad Pier was built tells an even larger story: Redondo Beach was reinventing itself.
From seaport to seaside recreation
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Redondo was a working seaport. Three large wharves handled lumber and other cargo, with rail lines carrying freight inland. But Redondo eventually lost the competition to become Southern California's principal commercial harbor to San Pedro.
By the 1920s, the city's old commercial wharves were disappearing. By 1926 all three of Redondo's original wharves had either been destroyed by storms or demolished.
Fishing, however, was booming.
Redondo possessed a natural advantage: the Redondo Submarine Canyon comes unusually close to shore, helping bring deep water and abundant marine life close to the waterfront. The City's 1995 Historic Context Statement describes sport and commercial fishing as important local activities and specifically notes that the loss of Wharf No. 3 and deterioration of the Endless Pier deprived fishermen of landing facilities.
That created an opportunity for Captain Monstad.
Captain Monstad and his fishing enterprise
The Monstad family became one of the best-known names in Redondo sportfishing.
By the early 1920s the family was operating fishing boats from Redondo and developing an increasingly ambitious sportfishing business. The operation eventually included live-bait boats and large offshore fishing barges—old vessels permanently anchored offshore where anglers could spend the day fishing.
Instead of simply taking customers on conventional fishing trips, Monstad developed something closer to a floating fishing resort.
Old sailing vessels were converted into barges and anchored on productive fishing grounds. Shore boats carried anglers back and forth from Redondo. The City's historic study describes barges equipped with restaurants, sitting rooms and even overnight accommodations, allowing anglers to sleep offshore and begin fishing at first light. The operation eventually became what the City's Historic Context Statement calls the largest sportfishing business on the coast.
One of Monstad's first barges was the Lahaina, a former barkentine converted to sportfishing use. Other vessels followed. Contemporary descriptions of the operation evoke a waterfront very different from today's: fishermen carrying tackle down the pier, live-bait boats alongside, launches continually ferrying customers offshore and large fishing barges riding at anchor beyond the beach.
But all of those boats needed a reliable place to land.
The aging Endless Pier could no longer adequately perform that job.
So Monstad proposed building his own.
A privately financed public waterfront
On November 30, 1925, Redondo Beach entered into an agreement with W.L. Monstad allowing him to construct and operate a wharf on city tidelands. The arrangement was unusual by today's standards: Monstad supplied the private capital to build the pier on publicly owned tidelands.
Construction followed, and by 1926 the approximately 300-foot wooden pier was operating alongside the Endless Pier.
We know an extraordinary amount about the original arrangement because it became the subject of litigation that reached the California Supreme Court in 1930: People v. Monstad.
The court record describes the pier's intended purpose with unusual precision. The City's amended 20-year lease authorized a "private pleasure pier" providing fishing and landing facilities and permitted fishing and bait stands and related concessions. Significantly, the agreement also provided that pole fishermen could use the pier without charge. Monstad was responsible for maintenance, taxes and insurance, while improvements ultimately were to become City property.
The California Supreme Court upheld the City's authority to enter into the arrangement.
The case makes the Monstad Pier an interesting early example of a public-private waterfront partnership: private investment supplied infrastructure supporting boating and commerce while the public retained fishing access.
What was the Monstad Pier actually for?
Unlike Redondo's earlier commercial wharves, the Monstad Pier wasn't primarily intended for unloading lumber or cargo.
And unlike the neighboring Pleasure Pier, its principal purpose wasn't simply strolling and amusement.
The Monstad Pier was a working sportfishing terminal.
Passengers bought tickets there, boarded fishing and excursion boats and transferred aboard launches bound for offshore fishing barges. Fishermen bought bait and tackle. Boats loaded passengers and supplies. At the same time, anglers could simply walk onto the pier and fish.
The distinction is important. The Monstad Pier represents the transition between two Redondos—the nineteenth-century commercial seaport and the twentieth-century recreational waterfront.
The fishing industry helped fill the economic vacuum left when commercial shipping disappeared.
Fishing barges and a booming business
Monstad's gamble paid off. His operation grew into the largest sportfishing enterprise on the coast. Contemporary accounts describe multiple barges, live-bait boats and dozens of employees serving enormous numbers of anglers.
The Monstad Pier became the gateway.
Advertising for the operation promised anglers trips to Monstad's "Deep Sea Fishing Barges," with boats leaving the pier at regular intervals. The barges were positioned near productive grounds for bass, barracuda, yellowtail and other game fish.
That history also explains why fishing remained such an important part of the pier's physical design. Even decades later, the south side developed a lower fishing deck, separating anglers and their rods from pedestrians using the commercial portion of the pier. The City's historic-resource study says that arrangement, with fishing along the south and small shops and seafood businesses along the north, has existed since at least the 1950s.
The gambling-ship era
During the Depression another, more colorful business briefly transformed the pier.
Offshore gambling ships operated beyond the reach their owners claimed local law enforcement could exercise. The most famous at Redondo was Tony Cornero's Rex.
Water taxis carrying gamblers to offshore vessels departed from the Monstad Pier, producing another surge in passenger traffic. The offshore gambling boom led Monstad to widen the pier in the 1930s and add approximately 100 feet to its length.
The pier that had been created to carry fishermen to offshore barges thus became, for a short period, a gateway to one of the more notorious chapters of Southern California maritime history.
But fishing—not gambling—proved to be its lasting legacy.
The pier grows with Redondo
The original Monstad Pier was much narrower than the structure familiar to later generations.
Historic photographs indicate that the 1926 pier was only about 25 feet wide, supported by three-pile timber bents. It was subsequently widened and lengthened. By the 1940s, tackle shops and food establishments lined portions of it. The eastern portion expanded again during the 1950s and substantially during the late 1960s and early 1970s as Redondo's waterfront became increasingly oriented toward restaurants and tourism.
In other words, the pier evolved along with the city.
A structure originally designed to get fishermen aboard boats gradually became a place where people could fish, buy seafood, eat dinner, stroll above the water or simply watch the activity of the harbor.
In 1983–84, a roughly 220-foot fishing promenade connected the western ends of the Monstad and Horseshoe piers, physically knitting the two historic structures together.
Then came 1988.
Surviving Redondo's year of disaster
January storms battered the waterfront. Another major storm in April destroyed the fishing promenade connecting the piers. Then, in May, fire swept through the Horseshoe Pier, destroying 15 businesses and much of the structure.
Redondo eventually rebuilt its municipal pier, opening the new concrete structure in 1995.
But the Monstad Pier survived.
That makes it fundamentally different from much of what surrounds it today.
Although piles, decking and structural members have necessarily been replaced during a century of maintenance, the City's historical evaluation concluded that the Monstad Pier still retains its recognizable timber-pile structural system and enough integrity to communicate its historic character. The study found that the combined Monstad and surviving Horseshoe Pier structures appear eligible for local landmark consideration because of their association with Redondo's waterfront history and their representation of traditional California timber-pier construction.
A century later
Today it is easy to walk across the Monstad Pier without realizing what is beneath your feet.
But its wooden pilings represent an extraordinary physical link with the Redondo Beach of the 1920s.
When the pier was constructed, Redondo's days as a commercial seaport were ending. The old lumber wharves were disappearing. The great Hotel Redondo had recently been demolished. The waterfront's future increasingly depended upon recreation, fishing and visitors.
Captain Monstad recognized that change and invested in it.
His pier provided the infrastructure that helped transform Redondo into one of Southern California's great sportfishing centers. It carried fishermen to offshore barges, welcomed generations of pier anglers, served excursion boats, briefly carried gamblers toward offshore casinos, and eventually became home to the seafood markets, bait shops and restaurants that helped define Fisherman's Wharf.
One hundred years later, the Monstad Pier still performs essentially the same fundamental role it did in 1926:
It brings people out over the water.
And among a waterfront repeatedly rebuilt by storms, fire and changing times, that simple wooden pier may be one of Redondo Beach's most remarkable survivors.
