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The eternal quest for attention
Long Beach has always been a city of hankering. In its early days it was all about tourism, luring midwesterners to the seashore for its salubrious ocean breezes and ceaseless sunny days.
Going into the 1920s and on into the 1940s, it was gung-ho for business, with banks and factories springing up northward to Anaheim Street and out into the burgeoning harbor with its shipbuilding facilities and bustling cargo ports.
Also during those early years, from 1913 to 1918, it was bigger than Hollywood, with its Balboa Studios churning out more than 1,000 films during that brief period, featuring works by Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and a young phenom named Little Mary Sunshine.
Long Beach struck gold with the discovery of oil on Signal Hill in the 1920s, which produced scores of overnight millionaires and the city bragged about its developing neighborhoods in Los Cerritos, Bixby Knolls, California Heights and Bluff Park.
The city chased national recognition as host of the Miss Universe Pageant in the 1950s, with a spotlight on the city that included nationwide TV coverage. That ended in business snarls that resulted in Long Beach spinning off a Miss International Pageant that lasted but one year in 1960.
That left the city once again looking for ways to bring tourists to town. It hired a research group in 1966 to conduct a study about how best to draw tourists. The study made the vague recommendation that if Long Beach wanted to draw tourists, it should buy a tourist attraction. Hence, the Queen Mary, which has yet to cover its own ever-mounting costs.
Meanwhile, the considerable money that poured into the city from petroleum helped fuel the town’s continuing growth, paying for numerous construction and improvements along its shoreline including the Belmont Plaza pool, Marine Stadium and other seaside developments that brought Olympic aquatic trials to town in 1960 and 2004 and prompted Long Beach to declare itself the Aquatic Capital of America. And with a new Belmont Plaza pool yet to be built, that title is on wobbly legs, even with local waters playing a role in the 2028 Games.
Now Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, in his State of Business address last week, is pinning Long Beach’s next renaissance on entertainment, specifically on mega music festival events at Marina Green including, most notably, the 2025 Vans Warped Tour July 26-27.
The hopes of regular music festivals coming to Long Beach are reasons for cautious optimism, especially with the addition of an amphitheater at the Queen Mary, which will be able to draw regular touring acts of the sort that once came to the Long Beach Arena on a regular basis. Sadly, it seems that the Arena won’t be part of the city’s musical future as concerts have been pushed aside in favor of conventions.
What really has to happen, though, to make Long Beach a true entertainment draw, aside from the addition of a Hard Rock Hotel, is a more bustling club and small-venue scene that this town once had, with a stunning and still greatly missed number of venues that regularly drew touring acts alongside the Arena (and, prior to that, the Municipal Auditorium). While the larger halls drew such acts as the Who, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Neil Young and the Grateful Dead, more intimate places like Bogart’s in Marina Pacifica, the Blue Cafe on the Promenade, Fender’s in the East Village, Cinnamon Cinder and Rumbleseat Garage at the Traffic Circle, the Comedy Club at the Pike and the Foothill in Signal Hill regularly drew top-flight recording artists including Sublime, Nirvana, Beck, Los Lobos and many more, mostly from the 1980s through 2000.
Those were fairly glorious times for lovers of music, and while the aspect of massive music festivals has its attractions and will surely bring more money into town, it won’t likely make Long Beach the music capital of America and will bring only a relatively few drops of money to offset the impending loss of oil revenue.
But, then, the clubs probably didn’t do much to fatten Long Beach’s coffers, either, but they sure made life in this city more entertaining.