The iconic landmark is celebrated in James Harris’ book, ‘Santa Monica Pier: America’s Last Great Pleasure Pier,’ newly updated and out now.
In a photo from “Santa Monica Pier” by James Harris, a view of the pier in the daytime. ’s executive director and historian James Harris is in his office, a former apartment in the historic merry-go-round building that also appeared in the 1973 film “The Sting.”
In 1989, Harris, then a recent college graduate from Colorado, was a bartender at the Boathouse, the Santa Monica Pier restaurant that has long since given way to a Bubba Gump Shrimp. The Pier was a different scene in the late 1980s. “Over coffee or cocktails, people would tell these great stories at the bar,” he says. “I was putting them in the back of my mind and it was helping me to fall in love with the Pier.”
“Having spent, by that time, about 20 years on the Pier, and having done a lot of research, I thought I had done a good, definitive story about the Santa Monica Pier,” says Harris. “It’s been one those great secrets that’s been a pleasure to share in the book,” says Harris about what went on inside the merry-go-round building. “These were apartments up here. People lived here. There were two children born up here. There were lavish parties thrown upstairs and downstairs by a woman named Colleen Creedon, that’s what she became known for.”Olsen was a pipe-smoking, retired sailor who led a remarkable life that included campaigning to protect local marine life back in 1928.
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