We a-pier-ed at the wharf

This evening Michelle decided to be spontaneous - although thinking back, she's "decided to be spontaneous" quite a few times in the past month, so I'm wondering for how much longer we can call it true spontaneity before she embraces this true part of her being - and thus we all piled into her car and headed downtown.

Our destination: the pier or the harbor. Seeing as the harbor is really nothing more than a bunch of docked boats which we can't ride because a) we don't own one and b) we don't know anyone who owns one and c) we don't have the money to hire one from someone who owns one, the harbor was out. That left the pier.

The pier in Santa Barbara is really quite nice; it has a couple of restaurants, a candy store, one of those stores for tourists where you can buy those plastic mugs and t-shirts that say "My __ went to Santa Barbara and all I got was this lousy __," an ice cream shop, and something with live fish, which I think may be a restaurant but I'm not entirely certain. You can also drive and park on this pier, which was a completely new and rather frightening thought my freshman year (I'd never heard of a pier you could drive on and growing up in Huntington Beach hearing stories about that pier's collapse, it's a rather understandably scary idea). At the beginning of the pier there is a nice sculpture of two jumping dolphins with the words "Sterns Wharf" engraved around the base of the statue.

It was this sign that started the discussion (I won't say argument since none of us would take a side). Was this long formation of wood and metal a pier or a wharf? Well, to be perfectly honest, none of us knew.

Enter google: http://www.stearnswharf.org/about.php

"About Stearns Wharf

In 1872 construction was completed on what had just become the longest deep-water pier between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Named for its builder, local lumberman John P. Stearns, the wharf served the passenger and freight shipping needs of California's South Coast for over a quarter century.

When the railroad finally reached Santa Barbara in 1877, Stearns added an additional spur to the wharf, providing a necessary transport link to his lumberyard and the nearby Southern Pacific Depot. The spur was damaged by severe storms in the early 1900's and was ultimately abandoned in 1923. A raiload logging car remains on the spur as a legacy of the times.

The Harbor Restaurant was built on the wharf in 1941, marking an end to the shipping and transportation era of the 1800's. The restaurant proved to be the economic backbone of the wharf.

Since its beginning, Stearns Wharf has had its share of natural and economic disasters, from the big earthquake in 1925 to a fire in 1973 which caused its closing. The wharf stayed closed for six years until restorations began, and in the fall of 1981 it finally reopened. Yet another fire in the winter of 1998 devastated the last hundred and fifty feet of the wharf, including Moby Dick Restaurant. Though the rest of the wharf remained open during this period, the rebuilding took over two years. The new Stearns Wharf stands today as Santa Barbara's most visited landmark."

What I gather from this little article is that the whole area is called a wharf but the actual structure itself is called a pier? I don't know. What I do know is that they used the word "wharf" far too many times in that small of a section of text.


So, we didn't actually come to a conclusion. I'm probably going to keep calling a pier. But that may just be a personal preference.