The Bixby Park Bandshell isn't really a shell, but the name is ingrained in the Long Beach vernacular.
The 1923 Spanish Colonial Revival open stage in Long Beach looks nothing like the grand, curving band shells of Boston and Chicago. "There's supposed to be a shell. It's supposed to be rounded so that the sound comes out to the people," said Long Beach historian Stan Poe.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 42 words Type of Material: Correction
Herbert Hoover: A caption in Sunday's California section with the L.A. Then and Now column about the Bixby Park Bandshell said the photo showed President Hoover in 1928. Hoover was not president when the photo was taken; he became president in 1929.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, May 18, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Herbert Hoover: A caption in the May 11 California section with the L.A. Then and Now column about the Bixby Park Bandshell said the photo showed President Hoover in 1928. Hoover was not president when the photo was taken; he became president in 1929.
Yet generations of park- goers have called the graceful, cream-stucco building the Bixby Park Bandshell. Over the decades, the building and the tree-shaded park around it became a popular site for concerts, theater, political speeches and the famous Iowa picnics that helped christen the city "Iowa by the Sea."
Then a February 2005 windstorm uprooted a large ficus tree that smashed part of the structure. It has stood deserted ever since as city officials hunted for funds to restore it.
On Saturday, a crowd of 500 celebrated the building's reopening at a festival featuring free food, theater performances, vintage cars and live music. The renovated structure, 100 feet by 28 feet, gleamed with its freshly painted stucco, a new red-tile roof and dark-green trim.
The event carried on Bixby Park's historic role as a central gathering place for the city of 473,000 on Los Angeles County's southern coast.
"It's a place where people have parties all the time: picnics, fiestas, band concerts, antiwar protests," said Julie Bartolotto, executive director of the Historical Society of Long Beach.
The band shell has been used for celebrations by the city's Latino, Cambodian and Filipino communities.
But what put the park on the cultural map were earlier waves of immigrants: the Iowans and other Midwesterners who settled in the Long Beach area and held massive annual picnics at the gracious, 17-acre park bounded by Broadway, Cherry Avenue, Ocean Boulevard and Junipero Avenue.
The annual Iowa picnic was the best known of these reunions. Thousands of former Iowa residents and their descendants jammed the grassy park -- so many that tables were set up with signs designating Iowa's 99 counties, The Times reported in 1940. "Sons and Daughters of Tall Corn State Gather in Bixby Park," read the headline of the article that estimated the crowd at 100,000.
