This Fall, Hermosa Beach Is Taking Its History Out of Storage

"The plaque surfaces are quickly deteriorating, and many have become unreadable," Parks and Recreation Manager Brian Sousa told the Hermosa Beach City Council in September. He was describing the bronze Surfers Walk of Fame plaques set into the pier deck. Within a few weeks, two pink-tiled showers from the 1976 film Carrie will be on public view for the first time in years, a short walk up Pier Avenue. Those showers sat in a city records room that the public couldn't enter.

At first the two stories look unrelated. They both lead to the same place. The Hermosa Beach Museum is a small, free museum inside the Community Center at 710 Pier Avenue. Over the past year it won a lease on more space and earned national accreditation, and it is now named as the home for whatever the town decides to keep.

Sixty bronze plaques and a deck that can't hold them

The Surfers Walk of Fame started in 2003. It has 106 inductees, but only 60 bronze plaques were ever set into the pier, covering the classes from 2003 through 2019. In 2020 the city stopped installing plaques because of concerns about the pier's structure, so nobody inducted since then has one. Six of the plaques already in the deck are missing because of theft or damage. The class honored on Pier Plaza on April 25 of this year included Laurie Wilson, Lonnie Argabright, Tyler Hatzikian, Pat Rawson and John Van Hamersveld, and none of them has a plaque on the deck.

A structural assessment of the pier found that the plaques are damaging its concrete deck. On September 22 the council voted 4-1 to take the bronze plaques out by the end of the year. Smaller stainless steel plaques will go on top of the pier's wood railing in their place, grouped by induction year. Staff estimated the cost at $12,000 to $16,000, and the money is already in the pier's capital improvement budget. Sousa said the railing has room for about 60 more years of inductees.

The council called the railing plan interim, and the debate showed why. Councilmember Michael Keegan voted no. He worried the interim plan would become permanent and wanted a real walk of fame along Pier Plaza instead. Architect Jeff Browning has talked with the family of the late big-wave surfer and board shaper Greg Noll. He hopes to help design a statue of Noll on the plaza, and past inductees have supported that idea. The council directed staff to work toward an agreement with surfing groups on a permanent monument paid for with private money. For now the statue is still a proposal. Councilmember Dean Francois said some options could run into Coastal Act protections for public ocean views.

Once the bronze plaques come up, they will be offered first to inductees and their families. Any that go unclaimed will be offered to the Hermosa Beach Museum.

A records room with two movie showers in it

The museum's chance to take in material like this goes back to November 17, 2025. That night the City Council unanimously approved a 10-year lease that lets the museum expand into the Community Center's empty former records room. The renovation will happen in phases as fundraising allows. Health and safety work comes first, followed by HVAC, compliant flooring, wall finishes and the other infrastructure the space needs before the public can use it. The city also set a checkpoint at the end of the third lease year to review progress on fundraising and permits, so the room doesn't sit empty.

That room held part of a film set. The Community Center started out as Pier Avenue School. The school was built in 1911, nearly destroyed in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, rebuilt as a WPA project in 1934, and later became Pier Avenue Junior High. The city bought the property from the school district in 1975, and it became the Community Center in 1979. The girls' shower with the pink tile from Carrie ended up inside the records room. Last year, Daily Breeze reported that one of those showers was in a part of the building closed to the public.

Museum staff have since cleared out the records room. One shower was part of the tour in past years, and this year two will be on display. The room is headed for office, collections storage and research space, but one piece of the set will stay.

"We are planning on preserving one of the shower heads with the tile because it is very historically significant. It's a big part of the community and the building history." Jamie Erickson, museum director and curator, speaking to Daily Breeze

The museum also keeps a section of the original pink tile on display in its galleries.

What the building actually did for Carrie

Daily Breeze reports that the gym, the building's exterior and the outside stairway next to the museum were all important locations in the film. The American Film Institute's production history adds some detail. It places the on-location work at the back of the gym, puts the school's playing field at Pacific Palisades High School, and says most of the interiors were filmed on a stage in Culver City. In other words, parts of the prom-night sequence were filmed in this building, but not all of it.

The film turns 50 this year. On Friday, October 9, the City of Hermosa Beach and MHP Haunt are holding "Carrie & The Prom" in the Community Center. Doors open at 7 p.m. The night includes a live band presented by South Bay Music Connection, food and drinks sold by Leadership Hermosa Beach, and a self-guided tour of the filming locations. The film screens at 9 p.m. in the Hermosa Beach Community Theatre. It is rated R and runs 1 hour 28 minutes. Organizers will post tour maps inside the building, and the route includes a stop at the museum to watch a slideshow of the filming locations. This is also the first year the 2nd Story Theatre, the black box space in the building, will hold an immersive "mini maze" that recreates characters and props from the film.

Tickets are $10, and the city's listing says they are limited. You buy them through a city recreation account, and costumes are encouraged.

Why a small museum ended up as the keeper

The museum opened in 2007 and holds nearly 3,500 objects, including photographs, postcards, surfboards, skateboards and costumes. On August 11 it announced its first accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums. According to the museum's announcement, about 3% of the country's 35,000 museums are accredited. It also says the museum joins roughly 200 California institutions with the designation, a list that includes the Getty, LACMA and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and that it is the only accredited museum in the South Bay. Erickson gave Daily Breeze different numbers: about 1,100 accredited museums out of roughly 33,000 in the United States, with Hermosa one of 79 accredited in California. Using either set of figures, it belongs to a small group.

Museum President Greg McNally said the accreditation "strengthens our hand as we move forward with our expansion," and gives the museum more credibility with funders. The timing of the money is less settled. The museum's own page says it announced a capital campaign in summer 2026. In an August Daily Breeze report, Erickson said a campaign for education and storage space would launch next year. Neither source gives a fundraising target. Separately, the museum's 2026 gala raised more than $150,000 for the museum overall.

Erickson has said she wants some of the collections to be visible and accessible to the public instead of packed away. Better climate and humidity control in the new space would also improve how objects are stored. The same rooms that once hid the showers would then hold the objects that come out of storage, possibly including surf plaques that families choose not to keep.

The rest of the museum's fall

Its upcoming calendar follows the same theme of local history being remembered and moved.

• Diana Mausser and the "California in Clay" tour, November 7. Mausser was a lifelong Hermosa Beach resident and a ceramics artist trained at UCLA. In 1990 she founded Native Tile & Ceramics, an artisan tile studio she later ran in Old Torrance. The studio designed more than 1,000 original patterns and made tile for California landmarks, including the Adamson House in Malibu. The museum's bus tour visits sites that feature her tile. It starts at the Adamson House and ends with refreshments at a Spanish Colonial Revival home in Manhattan Beach. The listing mentions walking and stairs, and it gives two different time ranges, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., so check the registration page before you go.
• "Threads of Time," closing October 23. The current exhibit tells the stories of ten Hermosa Beach women through historic clothing, plus a newer display of five bathing suits with five more stories. Both close October 23. The main exhibit opened June 26.
• "The Making of a Museum," opening November 14, noon to 4 p.m. The next exhibit opens with a community open house. It traces how the museum came together and looks at the gaps in its collection.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. Daily admission is free. The bronze plaques are scheduled to leave the pier deck by the end of December, and the city hasn't announced a specific removal date. The weeks between the Carrie screening and the end of the year are the last time all of these pieces sit where they've been: the showers in the room they were filmed in and the plaques in the deck.

Many Hermosa families have their own pieces of town history, like old photographs, surf memorabilia or furniture that has been in the same house for decades. When an estate is being settled or a long-time home is getting ready for sale, deciding what to keep, what to donate and what to pass on takes patience. Kevin Yamada and the Yamada Clayton team help South Bay families through that process with care. If that's where your family is, start with a conversation and a Personalized Home Valuation.