New Pier Director Gets His Wish

By Oliver Lukacs

March 23 -- Waving to police in passing cars and picking empty potato chip bags off the planks of the Santa Monica Pier, Ben Franz-Knight, 29, strolls past the arcade and pretzel carts talking business.

Fresh-faced, red tie to the wind, he looks like Tom Hank's character in the movie Big who can't believe he just got his wish. In Franz-Knight's case, a "dream job" in a "really cool" amusement park environment that is "awesome."

Two and a half weeks earlier, the Washington-born college graduate had been tapped by the 11-member Pier Restoration Corporation board of directors to head the agency headquartered in the "carousel" building above the 1922 merry-go-round spinning with laughing kids.

After serving a year as interim director and five as administrative assistant, Franz-Knight is finally in permanent charge of the day-to-day operations of the huge wooden structure that is home to street performers, cart venders and 10 tenants catering to 3.5 million visitors gallivanting the sandy planks every year.

"I remember the first time I walked into the office and sat down at the desk out there," Franz-Knight recalls. "I said, 'Wow. What a great job.'" Even before seeing the surfboards in the staff offices, "I told myself I'll do whatever I need to do to get this job and stay working here."

With predecessors in their forties and early sixties, Franz-Knight got many surprised looks when his appointment was announced earlier this month. "They were surprised to see a young guy like me and would say, 'How did you get to go from assistant to executive director?'" he says laughing.

A better question might be: How did a kid from a small farm town of 25,000 amid the wheat fields of eastern Washington with a degree in sculpture who created his own "unisex-type hip-hop-style" clothing end up running the Santa Monica Pier?

While there were many other qualified applicants, said Councilman Michael Feinstein, Franz-Knight was chosen exactly because of his "intangible" qualities, among them a certain "vibe" that could be felt in his presence, like the calm of a wheat field.

"There were a lot of people that applied that were professionally qualified for the job, including Ben," Feinstein said. "But Ben also has those intangibles that make for success -- a sense of where the community is at regarding the Pier, the ability to bring different sorts of people together, all under his good vibe and (with) the professionalism to carry all of this out."

Franz-Knight says he feels comfortable around the wide array of pier users.

"I think I have a natural ability to interact with all the different users (of the Pier) very comfortably," he says. "It is very easy for me to talk with someone who is a millionaire restaurateur or someone who is a street performer living down there in their car. I am equally comfortable in either situation, or conversation."

And while his "vibe" is an asset in mediating the different interests of multiple parties on the pier, it is not something he can put on a resume.

"People are always wondering how does (a sculpting degree) prepare you for business," Franz-Knight says. "I say well if you imagine that every sculpture project you undertake is like starting a small business," balancing budget with scope, securing space, and needing a staff to help build it, "then its very much like a small business on a micro scale."

Franz-Knight says he also attainted "a business degree in (the school of) real life" as the buyer for three major bicycle stores in Seattle and as the manager of a school-funded student-run non-profit bike shop at UW.

Maneuvering through the university's student and administrative bureaucratic maze to get funding for the bike shop, he says, is much like working with Santa Monica government.

"It's a very similar type of relationship. We're an independent corporation funded by the City. All the steps you have to go through to make what happens here work is sort of the same structure here as it was in the university. It's the same basic principles."

As with any business it all starts with an idea, and Franz-Knight believes he was hired because he "sculpted a vision" for the pier as a "place with a heightened sense of community pride" that City officials found appealing -- an offering of community outreach programs carved out of cost-cutting measures.

"I imagine (the pier) being a community centerpiece as well as a community gathering place, which would be the first place your family would want to go when they got into town," he says. "This is our emerald here in the city, this is our jewel. This is what we love."

So far, Franz-Knight has spearheaded such programs as "Pier Jams" that gives students from schools throughout Los Angeles County a chance to display their music and dance talents on a "world famous stage."

He also has teamed up with local muralist David Legaspi III -- who has painted murals at every elementary in the local school district -- to paint with 5th graders a seven-scene celebration of the cultural richness and history of the Pier.

And he is currently putting together a curriculum for a comprehensive tour he hopes all the schools in LA County will take. The curriculum draws on all the resources of the Pier -- the Ocean Discovery Center (History), the ocean (Biology/Ecology), the solar powered Ferris Wheel (Physics) and the Police and Harbor Patrol (Public Service).

His community-oriented vision is a departure from a traditional focus on securing corporate sponsorship, a strategy that for "a variety of reasons," primarily the City's strict signage regulations, "didn't reach the levels of success that were hoped for," Franz-Knight says.

"It was never going to be the Nokia Santa Monica Pier," he says. "There weren't going to be corporate logos on park benches or park railings. That kind of signage would never happen here. Santa Monica is really about protecting its uniqueness and history," which is something Knight knows about.

A fourth-generation American, Franz-Knight's family still owns the farm in Iowa originally bought by an immigrant forefather transplanted from "a weird part of Denmark" that was once a part of Germany.

"There (in Iowa) is still the white farmhouse where my grandfather was born, and just down the road about eight miles is the Franz School House that my great-grandfather built for all the school kids in the area," he says. "It's really a trip. It's a cool thing to have in my family."

Franz-Knight's vision of community, which he seems to have inherited, also includes the homeless. "Homelessness is a part of the Pier," he says. "It's part of the richness that goes on. It's a part of Santa Monica's culture."

Franz-Knight's work with the homeless dates back to his post-graduate days in Seattle. He landed work as a metal fabricator in a custom design glass blowing shop -- "if you don't get a job sculpting, you could still weld really well" -- and moonlighted as a volunteer art teacher at the First Place School for homeless children.

He later secured funding to expand the class into a full-time art therapy program. Because volunteer work was a family tradition, the art program "was a natural flow," which gave him "that extra excitement you need out of a job," a need he couldn't shape out of fabricating metal.

"It's a richness in work I look for," he says. "Anything you do for a living should not only pay the bills, but also inspire you somehow. I guess that's just something I was always brought up to believe."

At the children's school Franz-Knight also met his wife-to-be, and three weeks into the relationship she suggested going to Los Angeles.

"'I need to know if you're coming with me,' she said, and I thought about for about three minutes," Franz-Knight recounts, "and said 'alright.'"

As Franz-Knight walks down the planks looking towards the ocean, he smiles as if to say the "kid in the wheat field wind surfing in the parking lot on a skate board" has finally fulfilled his childhood "hankering for the California lifestyle."