That pier you walked out on — I promised you its life story, and it's a good one, because that pier is about the most stubborn structure on this whole coast. It has been killed and it will not stay dead.
The first big fishing pier here went up back in 1968 — a good pier, eight hundred and some feet long, and for a generation it was the heart of the beach. Then, in September of 2004, Hurricane Ivan came ashore right about here, a monster of a storm, and it tore that pier to splinters and scattered it. Gone.
So they built it back — and this time they built it to answer the ocean. When the new pier opened in 2009, it was a giant: one thousand five hundred and forty feet of reinforced concrete, one of the longest piers on the entire Gulf of Mexico. Concrete, mind you, not wood — meant to take a punch.
And take one it did. In September of 2020, sixteen years almost to the week after Ivan, Hurricane Sally crawled ashore right here and ripped a two-hundred-foot chunk clean out of the middle of that concrete giant. Left it broken in two, with a gap of open water where the deck used to be.
Did they give up? They did not. They poured over thirteen million dollars into it, rebuilt the missing span stronger than ever, and in the summer of 2024 that pier reopened, whole again, anglers back on the rail like nothing ever happened. Killed by Ivan, broken by Sally, and standing tall today. If you want to understand this whole coast in one object, it's that pier. It goes down. It comes back. Every time.
Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans · CC BY-SA 3.0
