The Cocoa Beach Pier, opened 1962

The Cocoa Beach Pier was built in 1962 by Richard Stottler, a local businessman, and it opened under a different name: the Canaveral Pier. It runs 800 feet out over the Atlantic. By the pier’s own account it took more than 2.5 miles of boardwalk planks and 270 pilings, each 40 feet long, to build. It kept the Canaveral name for 22 years, became the Cocoa Beach Pier in 1984, and stayed with the Stottler family until 2014.

The launch years

Longtime locals still talk about driving their cars right out onto the deck in the early 1960s, the pier’s history says. What made it more than a fishing pier was the view up the coast to the Cape. Mercury, Apollo and later the Space Shuttle all went up within sight of the rail, and for a decade the launch site on the horizon was officially Cape Kennedy (1963 to 1973). The pier’s history says Alan Shepard, the first American in space, reportedly visited.

The surf pier

It also became the center of the town’s surf scene. Dick Catri, often called the godfather of East Coast surfing, surfed here, and so did a Cocoa Beach kid named Kelly Slater, who went on to win 11 world titles (his story is here). One of the first Ron Jon Surf Shops opened on the pier itself in 1963 before moving to the corner of State Road 520 and A1A, where Ron Jon still is. The first Easter Surfing Festival was held in 1964.

In the early 1970s the pier also held a dance club called Asylum, with a lighted dance floor and live rock. The bands that played the pier over the years, by its own list, include the Beach Boys, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the Edgar Winter Group, A Flock of Seagulls, UB40 and Ziggy Marley.

Hurricane David, 1979

On the night of September 3, 1979, Hurricane David came up the coast. It had come ashore north of Palm Beach at midday as a Category 2 and ran its eye up the coast, over the Brevard barrier strip, reaching the Cape Canaveral area around midnight. Tides ran 3 to 5 feet above normal near the eye’s path, Patrick Air Force Base just south of town logged a gust of 90 mph, and the federal Storm Data log singles out Brevard for severe beach erosion. The full account is on our sister site’s Hurricane David page at Old Titusville, and the town’s other storms are in Cocoa Beach hurricanes.

The 1983 rebuild and the new name

In 1983 the pier went through a $2 million remodeling and expansion, which opened the Pier House Restaurant, now the Atlantic Ocean Grille. The next year the Canaveral Pier became the Cocoa Beach Pier. The first Cocoa Beach Fest was held there in 1989.

Westgate

In the spring of 2014 David Siegel, the head of Westgate Resorts, and his business associate Jim Gissy bought the pier from the Stottler family, its original owners. It now carries the Westgate name, and Westgate says it has put more than $4 million into redesigning it since.

The deck is still wood, the fishermen still work the rail at dawn, and the view north still runs to the launch pads. It was built as a place to fish. More than sixty years on it is the picture people take home from Cocoa Beach.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon