Mark Lane: Are the Boardwalk landmark's days numbered?
The one-two punch of tropical storms last year left all three of the area's ocean piers in shambles.
The Flagler Beach Pier is closed and decorated with yellow tape warning people not to enter. Daytona Beach Shores' Sunglow Pier remains closed. And there's a wooden gate and a sign warning would-be anglers away from the damaged east end of the Daytona Beach Pier.
The Flagler Pier was built in 1928, back when fewer than 200 people lived in Flagler Beach. It's such a part of the place's identity that its familiar green roof with the town's name in white block letters is pictured on the city seal. But city officials see no choice but to tear it down and replace it with a new structure that can better handle rising sea levels and a harsher storm cycle.
Previous coverage:Daytona Beach Pier undergoing nearly $700,000 in repairs
The Sunglow Pier, built in 1960, is privately owned and was built with old railroad ties trucked in from Flagler. It, too, has weathered its share of storms and had to be substantially rebuilt in the 1980s. Another rebuilding lies ahead.
Only the Daytona Beach Pier is open, at least partly. Nobody is fishing at its end, but tourists are back at Joe's Crab Shack. Repairs and damage assessments are ongoing. Each report about the pier's condition delivers more bad news to the city. It's easy to wonder how much time the structure has left.
The pier has long been the Boardwalk area's centerpiece. It's easy to believe that Iconic Daytona Beach Pier is actually the structure's full name.
A pier was first built there way back in 1902. It was made from palmetto logs and called Keating's Pier after its builder, W.B. Keating. Only two years after it was built, a storm tore away 50 feet of its end. A preview of what was ahead. Another storm in 1915 put the pier "in great danger of total or partial destruction" according to a Daytona Morning Journal account. Then it caught fire in 1920.
A new owner built a new, bigger and more impressive pier in 1925 that the News-Journal then lauded as an "elaborate pleasure palace to draw many visitors."
It's still a tourist draw. But for how long?
At its first meeting in the new year, the Daytona Beach City Commission approved $680,295 in repairs to the structure. Nobody thinks that's the final bill.
Last year, the pier was closed to fishing for four months while workers completed $140,000 in repairs.
In 2020, the city spent $1 million on repair and reinforcement projects which included work on pilings at the pier's seaward end damaged by 2019's Hurricane Dorian. After the city took over the pier from private hands in 2009, it took more than two years and some $10 million to reopen after years of neglect.
There's an old saying among boaters that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into. Well, the same thing goes for piers, unfortunately.
All of which has revived talk and dusted off existing studies for building a new concrete pier south of the existing wooden pier. A shocking thought to anyone who grew up around the old pier and remembers when bands from the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra to the Allman Joys (forerunners of the Allman Brothers Band) played inside the hall that now houses Joe's Crab Shack. When the Space Needle towered over the structure. When you could ride a gondola to the end of the pier and helicopter rides took off from the roof of the casino. (Usage note: That building was always called "the casino" because recreation halls got called that in the 1920s, not because there was open gambling there. Our open gambling was elsewhere.)
And the anglers bunched at the pier's end in all kinds of weather, and the catches-of-the-day blackboard always seemed to tally encouraging news. When it reopened in 2012, after years of construction and closure, people were carrying rods and reels to the pier's tip literally as soon as the gates were unlocked.
I think any basic concrete structure the city might build, though better adapted to life in the elements and a perfectly adequate fishing platform, would be a sad sight next to all the rich local memories of the Daytona Beach Pier in its heyday.
Still, this is a structure that likely has only one big storm left in it. Like looking in on an aged relative, I wonder at each visit whether this one will be my last.
Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mark Lane: Are the Boardwalk landmark's days numbered?
