San Diegans call this beach community around you OB, a resort town turned stubborn counterculture holdout amid San Diego's gentrification. Ocean Beach was platted in 1887 as a resort development, intended to attract wealthy tourists via the streetcar line that ran from downtown along Mission Bay. That vision never fully materialized.
Instead, OB became a working-class neighborhood, and in the 1960s and 1970s it became one of Southern California's most significant hippie communities — a destination for Vietnam-era counterculture that left a lasting imprint in the independent head shops, free health clinics, and community organizations that still operate here. Newport Avenue, OB's main commercial street, has retained an astonishing number of independent businesses — antique stores, used record shops, surf shacks, and dive bars that have been there for decades. The Ocean Beach Pier, at 1,971 feet the longest concrete fishing pier on the West Coast, juts into the Pacific at the foot of Newport.
The pier and the beach it anchors have been the living room of OB for generations, a free public amenity that belongs equally to the surfer, the fisherman, and the kid from far inland seeing the Pacific for the first time.