Huntington Beach

Huntington Beach - Surf City, USA

In the late 1800’s there was a sleepy little beach town called Shell Beach that was home to a ragtag group of settlers. They spent their days farming, collecting seashells, getting sunburns, and complaining about the lack of good fish tacos. Over the years the town name changed to Smeltzer, and then Gospel Swamp (for the revival meetings that were held in the marshland where Golden West College now stands), then it became Fairview.

In 1901, a man named P.A. Stanton had a grand vision - to turn this backwater into an "Atlantic City of the West." He bought up some prime beachfront property, renamed the town Pacific City, and attempted to turn it into a tourist destination.

In order to secure access to the Pacific Electric Red Car lines that used to criss-cross Los Angeles and ended in Long Beach, Pacific City ceded enormous power to railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington, who…you guessed it…named the town after himself in 1909.

Tourists enjoyed the pristine beaches until 1920, when Standard Oil struck black gold underneath Huntington Beach. Suddenly the shoreline was covered in a forest of oil derricks, earning it the charming nickname "Oil City." As the oil barons got richer, the beaches got trashier, and were littered with tin cans and other debris. This gave rise to the nickname "Tin Can Beach," but it didn’t stop the surfers from putting on their tennis shoes and carefully walking to the shoreline. Eventually, the state cleaned the beaches up, and in the 1960’s Huntington Beach emerged as a surf mecca.

The history of surfing in Huntington Beach started in 1907, when Hawaiian waterman George Freeth gave one of the first public surfing demonstrations here, helping introduce the sport to California. In the 1920s, Duke Kahanamoku, the father of modern surfing, surfed in Huntington Beach and was later inducted into the Surfers' Hall of Fame there in 1994, cementing the city's surfing legacy (check out the Surf Museum on Olive Avenue). The iconic 1963 song "Surf City" by Jan and Dean, while not directly naming Huntington Beach, is believed to have been inspired by the city and helped popularize its surfing reputation.

In 1991, Huntington Beach officially adopted the nickname "Surf City USA" as a way to promote the city, its world-class surf breaks, and iconic Huntington Beach Pier. The name stuck, and in 2004, the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau filed trademark applications for "Surf City USA". This led to a dispute with Santa Cruz which had been informally using the nickname since 1927 when a local newspaper coined the moniker there. After a lengthy court battle followed by a settlement in 2008, Huntington Beach was granted the trademarked name.

Today, the oil derricks are gone, but Huntington Beach is definitely not a sleepy little beach town. Our walk takes you through the heart of downtown on Main Street, past two of the biggest surf shops in California (it true, we looked it up!), onto the iconic Huntington Beach Pier, south along the boardwalk, across the street for a stroll through the Pacific City Shopping Mall (more shopping?!), and back again. Bring your credit card for this one!