The Sea Breeze Resort. Photo courtesy Western Neighborhoods Project

The Carousel restaurant building, once home to Fat Boy BBQ and Doggie Diner on the corner of Sloat Boulevard and 46th Avenue, has in the last month finally been demolished. Now a rumor has reached me that the Roberts Motel, the inn on Sloat Boulevard between 46th and 47th avenues, is perhaps close to the end of its days.

For about a decade I’ve heard of developer plans to raze the entire block the motel stands on, which would include venerable John’s Ocean Beach Café, Aqua Surf Shop and the long-closed shack that was once Leon’s Barbecue, to make way for condominiums with some ground-floor retail. Whether this plan is now imminent or another has been conceived, there are definite rumblings that change is on the way. Before the name Roberts disappears from the Ocean Beach area permanently, a review of the family’s long and colorful history along Great Highway is in order.

Dominic Roberts immigrated to San Francisco from Malta in the late 1860s. After operating a poultry business for 30 years, Roberts moved his large family (10 children) out to the Great Highway on the block between Rivera and Santiago streets, next to a roadhouse called the Sea Breeze Resort. Supposedly, the move was because of a doctor’s order for Roberts to improve his health with sea air. At the time, the Roberts family and the Sea Breeze had few neighbors, with miles of sand dunes behind them and just a few other roadhouses on the blocks north and south.

In 1897, Roberts sold his poultry business and bought the Sea Breeze, changing its name to Roberts-at-the-Beach. Between the roadhouse at 2200 Great Highway and his original land purchase (called “the ranch” by the family), Dominic Roberts had about five acres of property at Ocean Beach. When the patriarch died in 1910, his oldest son, Richard “Shorty” Roberts, took over and made the roadhouse a trendy destination for newspapermen, entertainers, boxers and racing fans.

Photo courtesy Western Neighborhoods Project

Calling itself the “Most Unusual Place in the West,” Roberts-at-the-Beach cultivated a quirky, if fashionable, reputation under Shorty Roberts. A large four-sided fireplace of exposed stone dominated the lounge area with giant paintings of marine scenes on the walls. Long before Benihanas or fancy wood-fired pizza restaurants, Roberts advertised that meals were cooked in plain sight at another exposed stone fireplace, the “Fireplace Broiler.”

During Prohibition, Roberts stayed open, trying to get around the Volstead Act by not selling liquor, but rather allowing customers to bring their own drinks surreptitiously to the sociable roadhouse. Police Capt. Charles Goff announced in the San Francisco Call of Aug. 10, 1925 that “the carefully secreted hip flask is to disappear from San Francisco cafes” after he raided Roberts one weekend and found among the “throngs of fashionably attired men and women” a number of liquor-packing violators.

The food, location and popularity of Roberts-at-the-Beach somehow got it through the dry years, and in the 1930s there were once more crowds of drinkers around the ornate mahogany bar, which was carved with reliefs of “tally-ho” carriages: full stagecoaches drawn by a quartet of horses. Horses, especially racehorses, were an overriding theme at Roberts, with equine paintings everywhere and rocking-horse races held on the restaurant dance floor — the winner awarded a bottle of champagne.

The Roberts connection to horses was solidified in 1938 when Shorty Roberts made a bet with Bay Meadows operator Bill Kyne that Roberts’ horse “Blackie” could swim the Golden Gate. The horse made it across the channel in a brisk 23 minutes. (See the video!) Its owner paddled behind, mostly being towed by Blackie’s tail.

Photo courtesy Western Neighborhoods Project

After World War II, the Roberts family began diversifying, starting a food-catering business, and in 1955 opened the motel on Sloat Boulevard and 47th Avenue. The family sold the motel in 1983, and despite the name hasn’t had any connection to the business since then.

The original Roberts-at-the-Beach closed in the 1960s. In early 1967, two promoters, John Baeaza and Gino Del Prete, opened the building as the rock club “Donovan’s Reef.” The club was able to have a concert license for live music, but the city wouldn’t allow dancing (this sounds like the plot of “Footloose”). Part of the problem was Del Prete’s other business: operating the Condor club in North Beach, where Carol Doda was famous for dancing topless. Concerned Sunset and Parkside residents packed permit hearings, arguing against the former roadhouse attracting “the wrong kind of teenager” and possibly corrupting area youth. Mrs. Thomas R. Best’s comments in the Dec. 29, 1966 edition of the San Francisco Examiner were typical: “We don’t want the beatniks, the topless and the bottomless in here.”

Permit Reviewer Peter Boudoures sounded like the stereotypical out-of-touch adult of every teen movie when he was quoted in the San Francisco Progress saying that he preferred that teens did their dancing at home, like when he was a teen: “When we wanted to dance we had a few people in to listen to the radio or Victrola.”

Youth culture lost. The Board of Appeals denied the permit and Donovan’s Reef limped on a while longer, trying to attract crowds with free admission. The Turtles played for the non-dancing teens that March. Eventually the old roadhouse was torn down and a public-housing project erected in its place.

Thanks to the Bushner family, who lived across the street from Roberts and knew the family well, for sharing their memories.

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

George H. Barron. Photo: California Historical Society (detail)

Editor’s Note: The days leading up to Halloween often call to mind tales of the unexplained. But while the chill such stories bring may seem to come from somewhere other than our coastal fog, we all know such things couldn’t possibly be true. Could they? Imagine yourself walking alone on a misty night in Golden Gate Park, and come to your own conclusion.

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Written account by George Haviland Barron, former curator of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Found in his personal papers after his death on June 24, 1942:

August 12, 1912

I credit myself as a man of science. The tangible achievements formed by the ingenuous and rational minds of great men have punctuated my lifetime. Electric light, the telephone, motion picture cameras, airplanes…yes, even the heavens themselves have been trespassed upon and conquered by the patient application of science during my time on this earth.

While in the course of my duties at the museum I have had occasion to handle objects and reliquaries that the superstitious would quail from—Egyptian mummies, Assyrian funereal artifacts, even a purportedly cursed idol from an Etruscan tomb—and never have I been tempted to entertain the validity of any folk tale, pagan myth, or report of supernatural manifestation. The events of last Friday night, however, have quite frankly shaken my confidence in this regard.

I was reading in my residence behind the museum before turning in, as is my nightly custom. I will forestall here any assumption that my choice of material was fanciful enough to cause what I witnessed thereafter; to help prepare myself for sleep I always delve into the driest periodicals and journals of interest to my profession, and on this evening it was a report on the archaeometallurgy of copper antiquities—hardly fodder for a tale of the gothic.

As the hour approached midnight, I decided to take a turn on South Drive before retiring. I often test myself identifying astronomical phenomena, but had little hope to do so this night. The fog had crept in. Tendrils of sea mist had gripped the night tightly, muffling sight and sound. I reached the drive, which I might have missed if not for the feel of the macadam road under my feet, and in the gloom I instinctively moved toward the lonely street lamp that stands on that part of the road. How deathly quiet the park felt at the hour! Even the usual doleful moans of distant foghorns were strangely absent.

No more than a moment after noting the extreme silence, and just as I reached the street lamp, I heard the clattering of horses’ hooves approaching from the east. I turned. Out of the haze of fog yellowed by the wan reach of the lamplight there did burst a large black horse galloping at full speed.

In an instant the beast was passing my startled form, and on its back I was surprised to see a young woman wearing a straw hat. Her eyes were protruding, her mouth gaped open, and her general expression was one of strained agony and terror. They were past me in a blink. At the curve in the road west the fog swallowed up the horse and girl and the sound of their manic ride before I had even finished raising my arm to hail the rider.

The apparition had a profound impression on me. The twisted countenance of the young girl, the furious lather on the ink-black horse, and the strange commingling of the pair with the grasping fog had me quite agitated and concerned. I at once returned to the house and called the park police on the telephone. Officer Connolly, one of the oldest members of the force, was on duty and answered my call. I asked if he had seen a speeding horse and girl rider, and if any disturbance toward the park panhandle could explain their mad rush west. Connolly replied that he had seen no rider and that all was calm near the superintendent’s lodge and police station. He then paused a moment before asking, almost reluctantly, “Did the lass have on a straw hat or bonnet?”

As I had not mentioned the hat in my rush of explanation I now exclaimed, “Yes, she did. Then you have seen her! She seemed in much distress and I think you might send a man to check on her.”

The old officer sighed and said, “Not to worry, professor. I know what this is about. If you’re free in the morning, I’ll drop by when my shift ends to give you a report.”

We made arrangements to meet at seven the next morning, and I went to my bed, satisfactorily expecting that the poor girl would be found and sent safely back to her family.

The next morning Connolly arrived at the residence in one of the two new automobiles the park commission had recently purchased for the police. A younger officer was driving the machine, and old Connolly sat in the passenger seat, looking uneasy with the ride and the general state of society to allow such mechanized horrors. Nevertheless, his face became solicitous as he rose to meet me and asked, “Well, professor, are you up for a little ride in the Devil’s cabriolet?”

While I held none of Connolly’s obvious prejudice against motorized vehicles, I was puzzled by the offer. “Where are we going?”

“To the beach. That’s where your fair rider was heading last night.”

“Is she there now?”

Connolly shrugged. “I’m not sure if she’s anywhere right now.” He saw my confusion and gestured me in. “Have a seat, and I’ll tell you what I know on the way.”

The fog had a translucent glow now, and it thinned as we drove west. Connolly turned sideways in his seat to talk to me in the back, but took frequent glances forward to check on his driver’s attentiveness to the road.

“I heard about her before I saw her, probably in my first year. Supposedly it was Eamon O’Brien’s horse. He was one of the first park police. As the story goes, he was outside the Three Bells, that old roadhouse that was on the panhandle, a bit before midnight. A young woman comes out of the Bells flushed with wine, wearing a straw hat. She gives O’Brien a hard time, just for fun, banters with him, and asks to ride his fine horse a little way down the drive. The girl was young, and O’Brien was young himself, so he does the stupid thing and puts the girl up on the big black horse. No sooner was she in the saddle than the charger took the bit between his teeth and bolted westward. They looked the rest of the night for her, but didn’t find her until the next morning. At the beach.”

We were just passing the Murphy windmill and the fog gave up its hold on the earth, evaporating into bright sunshine at the beach. I shook my head at the old officer, who I knew had been in the park police for almost 30 years. “What do you mean, Connolly? You heard about this woman in your first year on the force? The girl I saw last night couldn’t have been older than 20.”

“Yes, that’s her,” Connolly said as we stopped on the Great Highway. He got out and walked to the concrete pile seawall near the Beach Chalet. I followed and looked out on the sandy shore where he pointed. “They found the girl and the horse, both drowned and washed up there on the ocean’s edge. Since then, she does the run every year, a bit before midnight.”

Below us, on the otherwise spotless sand, headed straight west into the fizzing surf, was a line of hoof prints.

(Inspired by a “true” ghost story reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1912.)

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

Gary Silberstein and James Bonaldi surfing in front of Seal Rocks at Ocean Beach, early 1960s. Photo: Bud Lavagnino via Western Neighborhoods Project

The Kelly’s Cove Reunion approaches on Saturday, an annual gathering of surfers and other salt-water lovers who have enjoyed the Aloha spirit on the northernmost stretch of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach over the past 30, 40, even 50 years.

According to longtime Kelly’s Cove denizens, board surfing started on Ocean Beach after World War II, even if Old Man Kelly himself wasn’t strictly a surfer.

But could surfing at Kelly’s have started earlier?

Surfing originated in Polynesia (although a prehistoric version of surfing may have been practiced in Peru). In the later 1700s, some of the first Europeans to visit Tahiti and the Hawaiian Islands reported to the wider world the grace and dexterity of native “surf riders,” but the sport — and lifestyle — took more than a century to spread beyond its island origins.

It’s probably impossible to determine when the first surfer took on the cold waves of Ocean Beach. Many Hawaiian men were hired on to European-owned merchant vessels that worked the fur and tallow trades along the Pacific Coast in the early 19th century. Some ships were manned entirely by natives of the Sandwich Islands (as the Europeans were calling Hawaii then). Richard Henry Dana, writing in the 1830s, noted that Hawaiian sailors were “complete water-dogs, therefore very good in boating. It is for this reason there are so many of them on the coast of California; they being very good hands in the surf.”

The waters of Ocean Beach are cold, even when there's no snow on the hills of the Marin Headlands, as there is in this photo from the 1970s. Photo courtesy Dennis O'Rorke.

I like to indulge in a wild fantasy that one of these young men, his ship anchored in the sleepy bay beside the ragged village of Yerba Buena (San Francisco’s original name), persuades some of his shipmates to take a long walk across the sand dunes to visit the ocean waves. Grabbing a piece of driftwood at the beach, he wades out in the frigid Pacific to carve up a wave or two before hypothermia sets in.

A highly unlikely scenario, I know, but a fun one to imagine.

Duke Kahanamoku. Photo: Library of Congress

Far more probable a candidate for first Ocean Beach surfer is Duke Kahanamoku. Born in 1890, Kahanamoku began breaking swimming records in Honolulu in 1911, and won Olympic gold medals in 1912 and 1920. While he gained worldwide recognition for his swimming prowess, Duke (his real first name, not a royal title) was also a great surfer and acted as the first ambassador of surfing to the world. Touring for swim meets and speed trials in different cities across the world, Kahanamoku often demonstrated his skill with a longboard.

Along with members of his Hai Nalu swim club, Kahanamoku broke swimming records at Sutro Baths meets in 1913 and 1914, and appeared at San Francisco events regularly into the 1920s. Although I haven’t found any proof yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Big Kahuna or one of his comrades gave the waves of Kelly’s Cove a try during one of these visits.

Interest in San Francisco surfing history continues to grow, and perhaps evidence of Ocean Beach surfing before the 1940s will be found. In the meantime, enjoy this video trailer for “Great Highway,” a documentary about Bay Area surfing:

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

Photo: Fernando Cortez Ruggles

In the early 1970s, Dagfinn Kvale, who was the pastor of San Francisco’s Norwegian Seaman’s Church, took a few visiting sailors to the outer edge of Golden Gate Park to view a piece of history connected to a Norwegian national hero.

Just north of the closed Beach Chalet and in the shadow of the decaying, spar-less Dutch windmill, an old sloop, the Gjøa, sat with its prow pointed west at the waves of Ocean Beach. This craft was the first to navigate the Northwest Passage, traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Arctic ice.

A rusting metal fence surrounded it, but there were large holes one could step through, and more disconcerting was another hole in the hull of the ship. Inside, the group of visitors found evidence of campfires.

“The hippies had a special sense of appreciation for Gjøa,” Kvale recalled later.

“They liked to climb the rig and found out that the vessel was an ideal place for overnighting. … One hippie told us what a great pleasure it was to touch the ship’s frames, experiencing the voyage through the Northwest Passage on a LSD trip.”

The Gjøa (the pronunciation of which the San Francisco Call newspaper often insisted could only be obtained by hearing a Scandinavian say it) started life a simple seal- and walrus-hunting vessel and was named after the wife of the builder. In 1903, Roald Amundsen bought the boat and equipped it with a gasoline engine in preparation for traversing the top of the globe from Greenland to the Bering Strait, with hopes of tracking any shift of the magnetic north pole along the way.

This was the era of heroic exploration: perilous voyages undertaken to be the first to visit poles, cross mountain ranges or see the source of mighty rivers. Motivations included scientific research, personal fame (plus riches to be gained from writing books after the feat), and nationalistic bragging rights. Amundsen would prove to be the most successful of Arctic explorers, and his voyage with the Gjøa launched his worldwide fame.

Roald Amundsen admires his ship, the Gjoa, in Golden Gate Park. Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

In December of 1905, telegraphs received by the Norwegian consul in San Francisco confirmed that Amundsen and his crew had successfully arrived in Alaska.

The hunt for a Northwest Passage had begun with European explorers in the 16th century. Sebastian Cabot, Henry Hudson and James Cook all tried to discover a quick sea passage between Atlantic and Pacific.

By the time Amundsen and his crew set off with the Gjøa, the world was resigned to accept that heavy ice made a commercial route impossible, but the unmet challenge of discovering a way across the top of the continent gnawed at the pride of adventuring seamen. So Amundsen’s triumph was emblazoned on the pages of the world’s newspapers, and was especially celebrated in Norway. The country had just won official independence from Sweden, and now had a bone fide national hero to fete.

Rather than sail the small and slow Gjøa back around the continent to return home, Amundsen planned from the beginning to end his journey in San Francisco, leaving the tiny craft behind to grab a train east. After recuperating most of the year in Alaska and Seattle, the Gjøa was scheduled to arrive in San Francisco in October 1906. The face of the great city of the west had changed markedly in the form of a devastating earthquake and fire in April, and while still in the very early stages of rebuilding, San Francisco was proud and excited to celebrate the great Amundsen.

To the chagrin of the region’s Norwegian community, which had been planning a lavish maritime welcome for the Gjøa as it entered the Golden Gate, Amundsen sneaked into the Bay Area by train ahead of his boat and tried to keep a low profile in Oakland. Found out, he gamely played along with the celebrations, meeting his crew and reboarding his boat just outside the harbor line, accompanied by dignitaries, consuls and representatives from the Norwegian and United States governments. Receptions and dinners followed over the next week before Amundsen boarded his train for the East Coast.

The Gjoa on display in Golden Gate Park. Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Despite rumors that a Seattle syndicate had bought the Gjøa for $20,000 to display at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, the humble boat was taken to Mare Island where the Navy posted guards against anyone inclined to strip a relic from the craft. The Chronicle noted that the Gjøa would need major repairs to be seaworthy again, and considered it likely “she will be disposed of in this port.”

While Amundsen went on to more celebrated achievements, leading the first expedition to make it to the South Pole in 1910, and the first blimp flight over the North Pole in 1925, the Gjøa was saved from its muddy moorage near Vallejo to become a monument in Golden Gate Park.

The Norwegian consul asked the Park Commission to take possession of the ship, and the commissioners agreed. On July 6, 1909, 5,000 spectators crowded Ocean Beach to watch the Gjøa being towed onto the sand and eventually a ramp by cables (some jokingly hung their wet stockings on the cables as the work proceeded). She was situated just near the Life Saving Station where the Call predicted she would stand “until her mighty timbers rot. That will be 200 years or more.”

The number of people in the teeming crowd who carved their initials into the vessel’s side implied a less-optimistic prognostication for the Gjøa’s longevity. Souvenir hunters and vandals necessitated a fence be erected and a caretaker hired — the gentleman lived in the ship and was enumerated there during the 1910 U.S. Census.

The city installed a seal tank at the stern of the ship and, according to the Call, the Alaskan fur seal that occupied it acted as an additional nighttime guardian of the boat: “A seal can bark about as well as a dog, and when the pirates may attack … the faithful seal will bark its bullet shaped head off in warning.”

After a few years, some believed the meaning and significance of the ungainly ship had become lost to the public who passed it. To address this concern, a stone monument commemorating Amundsen was erected beside the ship in 1930. It still stands today on the north side of the Beach Chalet.

The Gjøa survived the explorer who brought it fame — Amundsen disappeared during an Arctic rescue mission in 1928 — but it deteriorated over decades of sitting in the open air at Ocean Beach. Occasionally the city would be spurred to make repairs and give the Gjøa a paint job (a 1968 visit to the city by Norway’s King Olav provided motivation for one such spruce-up), but generally the vessel that survived the crushing ice of the Arctic seas was a helpless victim to neglect and vandalism.

After an outcry in Norway over the ship’s derelict and declining condition, a Norwegian foundation made a deal with the city in 1972 to move the Gjøa to a museum in Oslo. There it was “restored” to the extent that only the keel and ship’s bottom are original, but it looks impressive on display again, even without attendant LSD-dropping hippies.

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

Photo: Dennis O'Rorke via Western Neighborhoods Project.

As Playland’s fun house, giant slides, pie shop and Kookie Kabob restaurant were torn down in the fall of 1972, a mysterious brick structure facing the Great Highway was fully revealed.

Round, with graceful, arched window openings and capped pilasters in between, the Romanesque edifice had faded lettering painted along the cornice and over one of the window arches: “Plunge,” “Tub Baths,” and “Bush & Larkin,” a strange reference to an intersection six miles from the beach.

The story behind the brick structure stretches back before the start of Playland, into the late 19th century, and connects with another Ocean Beach landmark that puzzles many who look at old photos and postcards: a long iron pier emerging out of the sand and extending out into the Pacific Ocean just south of where Balboa Street intersected with the beach. By the mid-1960s the pier was little more than a few pairs of skeletal posts that jutted out of the waves, acting as a southern boundary line for what local surfers called Kelly’s Cove. (Supposedly, Old Man Kelly, the possibly mythical namesake of the area, exercised by doing pull-ups on the pier.)

Photo: The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley

Both the round brick building and the old pier were created by the Olympic Salt Water Company, a business formed in 1892 to satisfy the public’s general preference for swimming in salt water. The health benefits of saltwater immersion were promoted since antiquity, but the pollution of bays, rivers and lakes after the Industrial Revolution boosted the reputation and popularity of seaside swimming and wading. Ocean breezes and salt water were synonymous with health.

Olympic Club president William Greer Harrison came up with the idea of pumping seawater from Ocean Beach to the club at Post Street between Mason and Taylor streets, for a saltwater pool. Club membership had declined, and the addition of a saltwater swimming option was thought to be an attraction that would bring in new blood. The directors of the newly formed Olympic Salt Water Company — all but one were Olympic Club members — secured rights from the city to transport the water across town for 50 years.

The company built an iron pier supporting and protecting an intake pipe that ran more than 300 yards out from the shore; a pumping station a few hundred yards from the beach just south of today’s Balboa Street; and miles of pipe across the mostly empty Richmond District to deliver water from the Pacific Ocean downtown. Part of the pitch the company gave the Board of Supervisors was the water would be available for salt baths in private homes along the route, useful for flushing sewer lines and cleaning streets, and available for firefighting needs. No household or agency seems to have taken advantage of these additional amenities, however, and the whole enterprise really was about doing laps in salty water.

The Olympic Club’s new pool, or “plunge,” opened on Jan. 6, 1893 and was an immediate success. Membership increased as hoped for, with the pool as a major attraction. The club contracted for 200,000 gallons of seawater a day, but the Olympic Salt Water Company made most of its money off the creation in 1894 of the Lurline Baths, a public bathhouse with an impressive colonnaded façade on the northwest corner of Bush and Larkin streets. For 30 cents, one could rent a suit and swim not only in cold brine, but also in ocean water heated by leading the mains through the steam engines of the nearby Sutter Street Cable Company powerhouse.

The round brick building revealed during Playland’s destruction in 1972 was the company’s pump house. Sixteen feet in diameter, capped by a sky-lighted roof with a vented octagonal finial, the pump house enclosed a 22-foot-deep well and pumping works powered by three coal oil steam engines in an attached building behind. A 120-foot-tall chimney loomed above the whole operation.

Up to 3 million gallons of seawater a day were drawn from the pier’s intake pipe and sent though a 16-foot metal pipe out Balboa and over today’s Geary Boulevard to the company’s 5 million-gallon reservoir and settling tanks near today’s Euclid and Masonic streets in Laurel Heights. From the reservoir, the water went on to the Olympic and Lurline pools by gravity.

The popularity of saltwater swimming remained high into the early 20th century. Adolph Sutro built his Sutro Baths in 1894 in the cove just north of Ocean Beach. The City of San Francisco opened the massive open-air Fleishhacker Pool (today the site of the San Francisco Zoo parking lot), and pumped in seawater to fill it just 100 yards from the beach. When the Olympic Club rebuilt its clubhouse after the 1906 earthquake and fire, a new saltwater tank was installed.

As the Annals of the Olympic Club explained in 1914: “Ask any Olympian what he regards as the most entertaining feature of his club, and without hesitation he will reply — ‘the swimming tank and its salt-water accessories.’”

Photo: Dennis O'Rorke

Beachside amusements began to surround the Olympic Salt Water facility on the Great Highway, and by the 1920s a decorative archway framed the front of the pump house, interrupting a series of new eateries facing the beach. The Sea Lion restaurant (later the Chicken Range) crowded in on the north, while the Pie Shop, Hot House and It’s It ran to the south. Playland’s Chutes water ride rose up just to the east, and one could be forgiven for mistaking the round roof of the pump house for the similar-appearing Loof carousel a block away.

The Olympic Salt Water Company’s franchise from the city expired in the midst of World War II, but operations had taken a hit earlier than that. Competition, maintenance issues and changing tastes closed Lurline Baths in 1936. The pump house was boarded up from public view, while the iron pier began a crumbling decline into an eyesore and safety hazard.

Saltwater swimming fell out of fashion by the 1950s. Sutro Baths became a skating rink before it closed and burned down. Voters rejected a plan to restore the decaying Fleishhacker Pool, and it shut down in 1971. Eventually, even the Olympic Club’s grand pool was filled with chlorinated fresh water.

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

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Photo: Flickr user dbaron

My co-worker complains that he has to leave his sunny Bernal Heights home to work in the overcast and fog of the Sunset District.

“It’s sunny everywhere else,” he complains over lunch at Bashful Bull Too while watching giant billows of cold cotton roll down Taraval Street. He’s exaggerating, of course, because even the sun-blessed Castro, Mission and South of Market neighborhoods have recently suffered from the pallor of gunmetal skies.

I think of July and August as the city’s version of the Montana winter or the Alabama summer — the litmus test of newcomer resolve. Hey, Mr. Google Tech Worker, if you can’t handle 28 straight overcast July days, perhaps you should move down the Peninsula.

Even natives and long-timers can feel sorely tested. As my friend Jamie, lifelong Richmond District resident, posted on Facebook last summer: “If you don’t leave, fog, I’m going to punch you in the face!”

I had a couple of high-school friends who lived just blocks from Ocean Beach and whose first cars were old Volkswagens with weather-decayed bumpers and fenders. The Outer Sunset fog took a nasty bite out of my friend Eamon’s car in the form of a scary-big hole in the floor of the front passenger side. When he gave me a ride to school I had to keep my feet wide apart and hold tight to my history book as the street concrete blurred beneath me.

As my friends and family know, I love the fog, but I understand people’s exasperation. I am not so blinded by the fog’s charms that I can’t laugh at the exaggerations and outright lies that early real-estate men and neighborhood boosters employed to convince people that west-side sand dunes were paradise on earth. Here’s one of my favorite quotes, from an 1899 edition of the neighborhood newspaper, the Sunset Breeze:

“Whatever may be said about the climate of San Francisco, one thing is certain — that Sunset District enjoys the best there is in that direction on this peninsula. Now, there is a sort of pre-conceived idea among our downtown people that this section is a special rendezvous for that itinerant sea coast visitor, the king of fog. Nothing can be farther from the truth, and every close observer of climactic conditions in San Francisco will bear us out in the assertion.”

The author went on to explain that the occasional fogs the Sunset did get were the better kind: “fresh, sparkling fogs, impregnated with the life-giving salt of the ocean.”

In 1892, real-estate mogul Wendell Easton stood in a drizzle at Ocean Beach and tried to convince a pack of reporters that the foggy west side was five degrees warmer than the rest of the city. In 1901, a magazine writer visited Carville and asserted that “perpetual summer reigns in this California village, and the cool ocean breezes make it a most delightful resort during the entire twelve months of the year.”

Of course, there are the negative depictions as well. Mark Twain may not have said that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, but he did complain about the cold ocean breezes (“I think there are icebergs out there somewhere.”) and he compared the fog on an early morning ride to the Cliff House as a “six-mile ride in the clouds,” proposing it would be more salubrious to take a balloon the next time.

The San Francisco Call warned in 1897 that trekking through the dunes of the Sunset District on a foggy day was life-imperiling: “Select a fine, clear day, as it is possible for one to get lost and wander about for hours should a fog come up. […] People have been lost there and in more than one instance the experience has resulted fatally.”

To avoid death by fog, or at least a bad case of the blahs, take the advice of longtime San Franciscans: Head to the Russian River and come back in September. If you can’t, perhaps this 1934 clip from Movietone newsreel’s “City by the Golden Gate” will help.

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

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Publisher’s note: Ocean Beach Bulletin readers, we need your help! Join your fellow readers in supporting news and information for San Francisco’s western edge. Donate to the Ocean Beach Bulletin using the “Donate” button in the right-hand column of this page. It’s fast, it’s simple and every dollar makes a difference.

In the mid-1800s, along most coastlines, no service or agency had a duty to come to the rescue of a foundering ship with hundreds of passengers. Tens of thousands of lives were lost each year to shipwrecks in the United States.

After some volunteer lifeboat societies had well-publicized successes, and areas without lifeboat services had notable tragedies, the federal government created the United States Lifesaving Service in 1871. Manned by “surfmen,” lifesaving stations were established all along the Atlantic seaboard and around the Great Lakes. In 1878, California received its first station at the northwest corner of Golden Gate Park facing Ocean Beach. A second lifesaving station, the Southside Station, was built at the northern edge of Fort Funston in 1893.

It’s hard to imagine a more heroic job, or one that commanded more respect from the general public that that of the 19th-century surfman at a lifesaving station. Charged with saving lives, the crews frequently risked their own.

In fierce storms, with monster waves, often in the dark of night, members of the service would run out of a life-saving station with a 36-foot-long wooden boat, launch it into the surf, and row a mile or more out to a ship foundering on a sandbar or sinking from a rock-ripped hull. Battling swells, flying wreckage and strong currents to pull survivors out of the water, the men would sometimes dive from the boat into the roiling seas to save people.

Rescues made from shore could be almost as dramatic. Using a brass cannon, the surfmen would shoot cable lines out to foundering ships to start a rope system to pull people in on “Breeches Buoys”— floats attached to canvas trousers.

The Golden Gate Park life-saving station. Photo courtesy San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

The weekly training exercises by the Golden Gate Park Life Saving Station crew would draw large crowds to Ocean Beach. The captain would give the call to drill. The crew would run to a small room at the back of the station to change into white duck-cloth uniforms with rubber-soled cloth slippers. The men would rip the canvas cover off the longboat, roll it out in front of the building on its wagon, and begin pulling the 2-ton rig over the beach sands to the surf. Once the boat was in water deep enough to launch, the soaked surfmen would climb in and begin rowing to get the craft past the breakers.

Offshore, the life-saving crew practiced pulling people out of the water, as well as righting and bailing out the boat in the event it capsized. A further testament to the danger inherent in the life-saving service, many men lost their lives to fierce breakers just in these strenuous training drills.

In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire, employees of the life-saving service were enlisted to help fight the great fires and aid in the rescue of people trapped in rubble. The stations themselves acted as shelter for the dispossessed and hungry. Up to 150 people were given refuge at the Golden Gate Park station in the first nights after the disaster.

The U.S. Life Saving Service merged with the Revenue Cutter Service to create the United States Coast Guard in 1915. With the introduction of motorboats the station complex at the end of Golden Gate Park had already become less practical to operate, and the beginning stages of the Great Highway Esplanade and seawall blocked easy access to the surf.

The station complex was dismantled in the early 1920s, and today nothing of it remains on the Golden Gate Park site. A tangible reminder of the service created to come to the aid of “those in peril on the sea” does still stand nearby:

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

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Publisher’s note: Ocean Beach Bulletin readers, we need your help! Join your fellow readers in supporting news and information for San Francisco’s western edge. Donate to the Ocean Beach Bulletin using the “Donate” button in the right-hand column of this page. It’s fast, it’s simple and every dollar makes a difference.

John Brumund store at the corner of today's La Playa and Irving streets, about 1905. Carville houses in foreground. Photo: Fernando Cortez Ruggles / Courtesy Jaci Pappas

Mom-and-Pop markets are still part of most San Francisco neighborhoods. Walgreens and 7-Eleven give them stiff competition, but the tiny stores’ licenses for hard-liquor sales, deli counters for sandwiches to go, and personal connections to customers keep places such as Charlie’s Market, Art’s Western Market and Great Highway Market open for business.

In addition to being a place to grab a pack of smokes or a six-pack, these smaller markets played an important role in the development and growth of the neighborhoods along San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.

Before the rise of the personal automobile, nearby grocery stores, butcher shops, bakeries, druggists and dry-goods stores were essential requirements. Filling the gaps, men drove trucks and wagons up and down the avenues delivering milk, hawking produce, selling needles and sharpening knives. Outside of formal wear and furniture, most everything a household required could be obtained within a few blocks.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the Outer Sunset district hadn’t developed enough to have the panoply of small businesses other city neighborhoods could rely on. Most streets existed only on maps, and miles of sand dunes and poor roads separated the cluster of tiny cottages, weekend rentals and horse-car cottages from the city proper. So the enterprising men and women who opened the first markets near the beach had to be butcher, baker — and possibly moonshine-maker — for the community.

John Brumund started with a saloon on the Great Highway in 1898, serving refreshments to weekend bicyclists, and ended up selling groceries as well as “hardware, paints, oils, crockery, glass and household goods of every description.” By the 1910s Brumund’s store had also become a real-estate and rental business, neighborhood post office, and community social hall.

A.E. Harnish & Co. at 4314-4316 Judah St., circa 1903. Photo: Fernando Cortez Ruggles / Courtesy Jaci Pappas

A.E. Harnish opened his own catchall store at 4314-4316 Judah St. around 1903. The signage on the front windows and walls advertised “teas & coffees, bakery & notions, groceries and provisions, fruit and vegetables,” as well as beer and an express delivery service (by horse-drawn wagon). Harnish took orders for meats and offered wines and liquors “for medical use.” On Sundays, when the recreation-seekers hit the beach, the store served lunches.

As its worn wooden floorboards testify, Your Market (My Deli) at 1460 48th Ave. is a survivor from those early beachside market days. Opened in 1907, the grocery was run for many years by Charles and Henry Bruecker, and despite the official name of Quality Market, most locals called it “Bruecker’s.”

Advertising in the neighborhood newspaper with the slogan “We believe the future better yet,” the Brueckers listed in 1925 that Quality Market offered fresh vegetables, “stall-fed” meats (today we like our animals free-ranging and grass-fed, but times change) and fish on Friday. Two delivery runs to neighborhood houses were made every day, rain or shine.

1460 48th Avenue in 1951, when it was operated by the Pond Brothers.

“If it wasn’t for that store, I wouldn’t be here today,” longtime neighbor Frances Larkin remembers. “Every bit of food that went in my mouth to sustain me came from Bruecker’s.”

Frances grew up around the corner from the store in the 1930s. She recalls that Henry Bruecker’s girlfriend, Miss Rector, lived across the street from the grocery and did the store’s books in a little room in the back (a room that is still there). She remembers how the Brueckers allowed neighbors to keep a tab at the store between paydays, and how Jake, the Brueckers’ butcher, would give a complimentary bologna slice or hot dog to the local kids. “At Christmas time they sold trees, too. They had everything.”

The stores that Brumund, Harnish and the Brueckers operated ranged in size from 1,000 to 3,000 square feet, and yet the residents of the Outer Sunset from the 1890s to the 1940s thought these markets had almost everything they needed. Today a Target or Walmart store, also trying to carry every necessity, can be as large as five acres.

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

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Publisher’s note: Ocean Beach Bulletin readers, we need your help! Join your fellow readers in supporting news and information for San Francisco’s western edge. Donate to the Ocean Beach Bulletin using the “Donate” button in the right-hand column of this page. It’s fast, it’s simple and every dollar makes a difference.

The Firth wheel was a major attraction of the Lands End amusements, and could be seen from ships at sea.

They’ve been doing some digging up on Merrie Way, the parking lot and promenade with the great view just east of the Cliff House and Louis’ Restaurant (currently under renovation). The National Park Service is wrapping up a month-long public archaeology program in search of artifacts on the site before a new visitor center is built on the strip.

But what does the NPS expect to find, and why is it called Merrie Way? Although it’s been spruced up in the last few years, for a long time it was, as historian and former National Park Service ranger John Martini wrote in 2004, “a dead-end dirt parking lot, scoured by Pacific winds and bordered by glowering cypress trees, there certainly isn’t anything about it that’s ‘merrie.’”

Adolph Sutro had bought most of the land around the Cliff House in the 1880s, and in the early 1890s was doing his best to remake the old roadhouse and its environs into world-class “pleasure grounds.” Sutro Heights, his own estate on the promontory above the Cliff House, had ornamental gardens, terraces and stairways elaborated with Greek statuary — all open to the public.

After a fire destroyed the Cliff House, Sutro commissioned an eight-story Victorian building to replace it. In the cove to the north he started work on a massive natatorium, Sutro Baths, for indoor swimming, concerts and a museum of curiosities. He went into direct competition with the monopolistic Southern Pacific company to create and operate his own steam-train line to provide affordable public transportation to his oceanside attractions.

Despite all the new construction, Sutro also had a bit of the garage-sale browser in him. When the transit companies offered obsolete horse cars for sale, Sutro picked up one to use as concession stand on a beachside lot south of Golden Gate Park. The humble “coffee saloon” started a boom of transit-car rentals that became the bohemian enclave of Carville-by-the-Sea.

When the contents of Woodward’s Gardens, a Mission District amusement park, were auctioned off in 1893, Sutro bought benches, taxidermy specimens, statues and a pipe organ for use in Sutro Baths.

Another great opportunity for bargains arose the next year when the Midwinter Fair closed in Golden Gate Park.

The California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 was a lesser spin-off of the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. That massive celebration, meant to commemorate — a year late — the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas, attracted 27 million attendees from across the world. It also remade Chicago both materially and in reputation, influenced for a generation the fields of art, architecture and city planning, and introduced to the United States the concept of a fair “midway” — an amusement zone specifically created for sideshows, attractions and rides.

M.H. de Young, owner and editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, had been a commissioner for the Columbian Exposition and had the idea to have a fair in Golden Gate Park to highlight California’s mild winter weather, in hopes of attracting people and industry to San Francisco. De Young cherry-picked exhibits, performers, themes and rides from the Chicago fair for San Francisco, and the Midwinter Fair opened in Golden Gate Park on Jan. 27, 1894. The music concourse, the Japanese Tea Garden, and the De Young Museum all have their origins from the 1894 fair, but most of the exhibits and rides were removed or destroyed after closing day, July 4, 1894.

Sutro grabbed what he could get, especially fair concession booths and rides. Between the terminal station of his steam-train line and Sutro Baths he relocated some of the fair’s most dramatic attractions.

Riders exiting the train station for their day of amusement at the oceanside would be greeted by the towering Firth Wheel, what we would call an enclosed Ferris Wheel today. (George Ferris invented the ride for the Columbian Exposition. De Young got J.K. Firth & Co. to make him a smaller one for the Midwinter Fair.)

One hundred feet in diameter, the wheel had 16 carriages and offered a dramatic views for those who took the 20-minute ride. (Did thrill-seekers have longer attention spans in the 1890s?) The massive wheel, illuminated by hundreds of electric lights, acted as a beacon for ships approaching the Golden Gate at night.

Alongside the Firth Wheel was the fair’s “Haunted Swing,” a glider-bench that swayed passengers back and forth in the dark using a movable room that created the illusion of circling 360 degrees. Sutro later brought in the Scenic Railway, a roller coaster of sorts, but very mild by later standards. The strip of attractions, complete with peanut, beverage and chowder stands, and likely haunted by entertainers such as Johnny the Birdman, was given the name “Merry Way” by Sutro.

Sutro died in 1898. The Merrie Way pleasure grounds didn’t last much longer. As an investment the enterprise was unprofitable, and the salty ocean winds and fog probably made maintenance of the old fair rides a headache.

Emma Merritt, Sutro’s daughter, had most of the attractions closed by 1899. The Firth Wheel lasted until 1911, when a winter storm damaged the clutches and the rusty wheel began rotating — without passengers — uncontrolled in the wind. On March 14, 1911 the monument was toppled for the junkman.

Sometime before 1920, the strip’s name changed to the Middle English spelling of “Merrie Way.” No one is sure how or why.

So, what are the archeologists finding up there on the bluff?

Short-lived as it was, Merrie Way produced a good amount of tantalizing garbage to unearth a century later. Martini reports that remnants of several of the food-concession stands brought over from the 1894 Midwinter Fair have been unearthed along Point Lobos Avenue. One charred wood foundation has been discovered, along with bottles, enameled signs, pieces of window glass with advertising, and hundreds of pounds of dumped oyster shells from the chowder shop.

In the 1920s a more successful beachside amusement zone developed down the hill between Balboa and Fulton streets. Playland-at-the-Beach lasted decades longer than the Merrie Way pleasure grounds, and I now wonder what recreational detritus might be found in the sands around that Safeway.

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

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Publisher’s note: Ocean Beach Bulletin readers, we need your help! Join your fellow readers in supporting news and information for San Francisco’s western edge. Donate to the Ocean Beach Bulletin using the “Donate” button in the right-hand column of this page. It’s fast, it’s simple and every dollar makes a difference.

The Surf Theater on Irving Street. Photo: Courtesy Jack Tillmany

I was a junior at Sacred Heart High School in 1981, and I wanted to impress a girl from St. Rose who seemed refined, worldly — and, frankly, out of my league. I asked her on a date to go to the Bridge Theater to see “Das Boot.” It was the first movie with subtitles I ever saw, and walking her home, talking about camera angles, I felt equal to any lacrosse-playing dilettante she could snag at St. Ignatius. Thank you, Bridge Theater.

For a generation of San Franciscans a bit older than me, the Surf Theater in the outer Sunset District served as a similar beacon of international sophistication on many a foggy night. Dozens of people have told me their introduction to the films of Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard came at the Surf Theater on Irving Street between 46th and 47th avenues.

On the Western Neighborhoods Project message board, Bruce Skogen summed up the interesting role the Surf played in 1960s San Francisco:

The Surf ran all the European art films and I was there for every feature: La Dolce Vita, Persona, La Chinoise, Jules e Jim… These films were reshaping the sensibility of a generation. They inspired the emerging American directors of the 70′s, and here they were playing in the remotest hinterlands of the most conservative middle class neighborhood in the city.

Gary Meyer, who now runs the Balboa Theater, remembers the N-Judah unloading packs of movie lovers going to the Surf: “You might arrive early enough to have garlic steamed crab at the Vietnamese restaurant by the streetcar stop. And after the show, lively conversations filled the streetcar as dozens of strangers became a discussion group about the challenging movie just screened.”

The Surf opened in 1926 as the Parkview at 4510 Irving St. In 1937 it was rechristened the Sunset Theater, but continued being a standard neighborhood theater showing second-run movies that had played themselves out at the big theaters on Market Street. Locals called it the “flea house” because of the sand fleas that roosted in the rows. That strip of Irving Street had a series of small businesses. On the northwest corner was a Safeway grocery that became the Busy Bee Market and today is Mollusk Surf Shop. Across the street was Sunset Poultry and Egg. Next door, to the west of the theater, was Corabell’s bar.

Owner-operator Isabella Strohmeyer remodeled the theater and reopened it as the Surf on July 24, 1957. Strohmeyer introduced the Outer Sunset to international films, but sold out after a couple of years to Mel Novikoff. Under the cutting-edge programming of Novikoff, the Surf Theater became a destination for serious moviegoers around the Bay Area. The Surf showed films from the modern masters across the seas as well as classic and challenging films from Hollywood’s early days: “Modern Times,” “African Queen” and “Metropolis.” Novikoff opened the Cine Café next door, bringing espresso to the Avenues in the days when the Italian cafes of North Beach were the only place to get an exotic coffee in San Francisco. (Perhaps Java Beach should put up a photograph of Mel in tribute.)

A few neighborhood businesses changed along with the Surf’s hip transformation. Corabell’s bar was renamed The Sunset, and local historian Dennis O’Rorke remembers it as a “women’s bar” before the Gay Pride movement. Sunset Poultry became the progressive, parent-run NEAT school (later Rivendell School) in the early 1970s.

Surf Theater with the Sunset Bar next door on the left. Photo: Courtesy Greg Gaar

Novikoff built on his success by creating the Surf Theatres Group and making the Clay, Lumiere and Bridge repertory houses. His greatest success and continuing legacy was the restoration and revival of the Timothy Pflueger-designed Castro Theater.

The success of revival-theater programming across San Francisco diminished the uniqueness of the Surf. Business declined as Novikoff returned to showing recent second-run movies at his Irving Street theater. On July 7, 1985 the 59-year-old movie house showed its last film. The site has had a church on it for many years now.

Novikoff died in 1987. The San Francisco International Film Festival gives an annual award in his name to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the film-going public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.

Inside the Surf Theater. Photo: Cliff Tune

While the Surf and Novikoff are both gone, the experience of walking out of a theater near the beach — the images of a just-watched film reverberating in your head, the smell of ocean air, the sight of a quiet street wet with fog and illuminated by the glow of a neon marquee — is still available. Make a visit to the Balboa Theater at 38th Avenue and Balboa Street. Have some dinner before the movie, drop by Zephyr or Simple Pleasures café afterward, and raise an espresso in memory of the Surf.

Theater historian Jack Tillmany, who is a generous source of theater knowledge and photos, is still searching for an image of the Surf as the Sunset or Parkview. Let us know if you find one.

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Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”

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Publisher’s note: Ocean Beach Bulletin readers, we need your help! Join your fellow readers in supporting news and information for San Francisco’s western edge. Donate to the Ocean Beach Bulletin using the “Donate” button in the right-hand column of this page. It’s fast, it’s simple and every dollar makes a difference.