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Arts & Entertainment

Landmark Hermosa: Historical Museum

If you guessed the Hermosa Beach Historical Society Museum for this morning's trivia, you were right.

In celebration of Landmark Hermosa’s one-year anniversary, we pay homage to the , which inspires the community to explore the origins and growth of our beach city.

The Historical Museum is tucked behind the Hermosa Beach Community Center on Pier Avenue.

Since 1987, the Hermosa Beach Historical Society and its museum have preserved the history of Hermosa Beach through memorabilia and rare artifacts.

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The museum's original collection contained rescued items from a number of residents, most notably Patricia Gazin, who was elected the city's first City Councilwoman and mayor in 1959.

Before the museum opened, Gazin kept Hermosa artifacts in her backyard for three decades, according to a Los Angeles Times report in 1991.

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Artifacts included the large, block letters that once spelled C-I-T-Y H-A-L-L on the municipal building circa 1913, the report said.

Other slices of Hermosa’s past displayed in the museum’s early collections were uprooted wooden railroad crossings and pieces of track from the (still on display today,) a 1938 menu from Hank and Perry's drive-in, and a collection of vintage postcards.

Before the museum was founded, the space housed the old Pier Avenue School girls' gym.

"A sloped cement floor grooved with drainage gutters left over from the girls’ showers" along with walls that "defied efforts to mount or hang exhibits" was the look of the museum when it first opened, according to a report published in Easy Reader magazine in 2007.

But then, after 20 years of existence, the museum was renovated in 2007. Following three years of construction, the room nearly tripled in size allowing more open space for each exhibit. A vault was built to store documents, photos and periodicals dating to the early 1900s.

The museum, which holds a collection of about 3,500 items, is located at 710 Pier Ave. and open on Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

Congratulations to  for correctly guessing today's Landmark Hermosa. We'll have a new trivia next Friday.

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