F I R S TP R E V195NEXTLAST

Surfer, Ocean Beach
In the mid 1800s Ocean Beach, on San Francisco's west coast, was the favorite weekend get-away spot. Those who didn't own carriages would pay the Park and Ocean Railroad 10 cents for a ride from the city, across the six miles of sand dunes to the beach. Decades later on December 7th, 1941 thousands of San Franciscans would gather on Ocean Beach, looking out toward Hawaii's Pearl Harbor and searching for a possible Japanese invasion fleet. In the 1980s a local, Larry Harvey, who had been recently dumped by his girlfriend, burned a man-shaped sculpture on the beach as a cathartic exercise. Every year he repeated the ritual which grew in scope and attendance eventually becoming the Burning Man Festival, now held in the desert outside Black Rock City, Nevada.
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