Manhattan Beach

I spend most of my time working the South Bay coastline, and Manhattan Beach is the town other beach cities get compared to. It has the pier everyone's seen in photos, volleyball nets that turn into a stadium every August, and a downtown people actually walk to. When clients ask me what sets it apart from Hermosa or Redondo, I usually start at the pier, because that's where the town's story starts too.

Manhattan Beach got its name from a coin flip. Around 1902, developers were building out two competing beachfront tracts, Manhattan and Shore Acres, and settled the naming rights with a coin toss; Manhattan won. The city incorporated a decade later, on December 7, 1912, with about 600 residents, most of them living on sand dunes 50 to 70 feet high and connected by wooden planks before there were paved streets. The Santa Fe Railroad reached the area in 1888, and the Pacific Electric Red Car followed in 1903, running along the oceanfront and bringing families down from Pasadena and Los Angeles to buy beachfront lots, a preview of the pull this town still has.

The pier anchors all of it. The current concrete pier, with its distinctive rounded end designed by engineer A.L. Harris to take the punishment of storm swells, was dedicated on July 5, 1920, after two earlier wooden piers were destroyed by storms. It's now the oldest standing concrete pier on the West Coast and was named a California State Historic Landmark in 1995. At the end of it sits the Roundhouse, an octagonal, Mediterranean-style building from 1922 that houses a free public aquarium and marine studies lab. From the pier, Manhattan Beach Boulevard runs into downtown, the restaurants, boutiques, and coffee shops along Manhattan Avenue and Highland, and the Strand, the beachfront walkway that runs the length of the sand and connects Manhattan Beach to Hermosa and Redondo, gives the town its daily rhythm: runners, cyclists, dog walkers, and Strand-front homes all sharing the same stretch of concrete.

This is also the birthplace of beach volleyball as a spectator sport. The Manhattan Beach Open started in 1960 and has been the marquee event on the AVP tour since 1984; locals still call it the "Granddaddy of Beach Volleyball," and past champions get a bronze plaque on the pier's Volleyball Walk of Fame. Surf culture runs just as deep: Dale Velzy opened what's considered the first commercial surf shop near the pier in 1949. A few minutes inland, the town has long had an aerospace and engineering identity, too. Space Park, the TRW-turned-Northrop Grumman campus that helped develop Apollo-era spacecraft technology, expanded into a 90-acre Manhattan Beach site starting in 1968, and that engineering backbone carries through in the tech and aerospace companies still based in the area today.

What draws buyers here isn't just the beach. It's a real, walkable small town with easy freeway and airport access, a school system families plan moves around, and a coastline that still feels residential rather than touristy. People tend to move to Manhattan Beach for the long haul, to raise kids a few blocks from the sand, to bike to the pier instead of driving, to be part of a community that still turns out for the same volleyball tournament every August.

If Manhattan Beach is on your radar, whether you're circling the walk streets or just started paying attention to what's on the Strand, I'd love to talk through what's out there right now. Reach out anytime, or take a look at current South Bay listings to see what's available today.