"El Porto is the people's surf break of LA County, and that's what makes our little town above the beach so different from the rest of Manhattan Beach."
Woodrow "Pack" Landfair said that in January, standing in front of the shop he's owned since 2017. He wasn't being nostalgic. For most of the last century, that sentence was administratively true. El Porto sat inside Manhattan Beach's city limits the way a keyhole sits inside a door, an unincorporated county island surrounded on every side by a city it wasn't part of. Los Angeles County ran it. Manhattan Beach didn't touch it. That arrangement ended in November 1980, when the roughly 34-acre neighborhood and its 1,185 residents were formally annexed into the city.
Forty-six years later, the paperwork says El Porto is Manhattan Beach. The neighborhood itself never fully agreed to the merger, and the reason isn't sentiment. It's structural. The ten blocks between 38th and 45th Street run on a different set of civic muscles than downtown, and those muscles are still exercised by the same handful of people, on a schedule that has nothing to do with the city calendar.
Ten Blocks, One Zip Code, Two Identities
El Porto was subdivided in 1911 by developer George H. Peck into 83 business lots and 225 residential lots, laid out narrow, with alleys instead of yards. It grew up as its own seaside settlement, not a suburb of anything, and it stayed that way as a county island through the mid-century decades when Manhattan Beach proper was consolidating into the pier-centric downtown residents recognize today. By the time annexation happened, El Porto already had eighty years of practice being self-contained.
That's the part the 1980 vote didn't undo. Downtown Manhattan Beach organizes itself around Manhattan Beach Boulevard and the pier. El Porto organizes itself around Highland Avenue and, more specifically, around a surf shop's parking lot at 3804 Highland. The city line runs through both places equally. The social gravity doesn't.
The Parking Lot That Doubles as a Town Square
El Porto Surf Shop rents boards and wetsuits, which is what a surf shop is supposed to do. Under Landfair's ownership it has also become the neighborhood's default venue. The shop hosts monthly First Thursday gatherings that turn its lot into an evening hangout, pulling in restaurants and bars from within a few blocks: Sloopy's, Obi's, Pancho's, and Sharkeez all show up to participate, alongside live music and the kind of loose foot traffic that doesn't happen by accident in a neighborhood where street parking is already tight.
Landfair's read on why this works has less to do with marketing and more to do with proximity to LAX. El Porto sits close enough to the airport that the shop has extended its hours to catch travelers coming straight off a flight, and the surf lessons, board rentals, and late-night gear turnover have made the business something closer to a community front desk than a retail counter.
The newest addition to that front desk is a multilingual mural by local artist Robert Perada, installed on the building where it's visible to anyone entering Manhattan Beach on Highland. Landfair has described the shop's clientele as drawing people speaking nearly every language and coming from every background, and the mural functions less as decoration than as a sign posted at the neighborhood's actual entrance, well before anyone reaches the city's.
None of this is city-funded. There's no parks department line item for First Thursday. It happens because one business owner decided a parking lot could double as a town square, and enough neighboring businesses agreed to show up.
A Contest That Isn't Really About Surfing
The clearest evidence that this is infrastructure and not a marketing bit is the El Porto Surf Contest, which returned for its fifth year on January 31, 2026. It runs as one of eight annual events in the South Bay Boardriders Surf Series, which puts it on a regional competitive calendar. But the contest's actual function in El Porto is local fundraising and local roll call. Proceeds go entirely to the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation, which supports adaptive surfing and ocean access for people with physical challenges and operates out of El Porto Beach.
The list of businesses that contributed raffle goods to the 2026 contest reads like a map of the ten-block neighborhood: El Porto Surf Shop, Barlz Surf, Player's Liquor, Sloopy's Beach Cafe, OB's, Fishbar, Pancho's, Sea View Inn, Round Willow Yoga, Sand Spa, El Porto Laundry, Sol Seek Yoga, Two Guns Espresso, Offset Coffee, and the Manhattan Beach Hotel, among others. That's not a sponsor list assembled by an events company. It's the neighborhood's own business directory volunteering itself.
Landfair has been direct about what the contest is protecting. He's described wanting to preserve an openness and authenticity in El Porto, a place still rooted in real surf culture where everyone feels welcome, rather than seeing it rebranded into something more polished or exclusive, and he's pointed out that this is also what separates El Porto from the more curated establishments clustered around the Manhattan Beach Pier. In 2025 alone, according to Landfair, the shop rented equipment to surfers from more than 90 countries and all 50 states. That's a business with genuine global draw choosing to keep its identity local rather than scaling into something more generic, which is precisely the tension the contest exists to manage.
The Highland Avenue Ghosts
The character being protected didn't start with Landfair. It's been passed down through a string of businesses that occupied the same handful of addresses long before he arrived. Surfboard shaper Dale Velzy developed his signature V-fin design working the punishing beach break at El Porto, a piece of surf engineering history that traces directly back to these waves. Cisco's, in the building where Sharkeez now operates, was once owned by the Smothers Brothers and Clint Eastwood, and Ike and Tina Turner were known to play there. Today's Fishbar occupied the same footprint as the old Turf & Sand, then the Frigate, then the Pelican. El Porto is even thought to be the inspiration for Gordita Beach in Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice, a detail locals repeat with the kind of pride reserved for places that resist easy categorization.
The pattern across all of it is continuity of character through changes in ownership. Buildings changed hands. The personality attached to those addresses didn't reset each time. That's a harder thing to engineer than a mural or a monthly gathering, and it's the reason El Porto's current run of community-building lands the way it does. Landfair isn't inventing a neighborhood identity from nothing. He's the latest person tending one that Highland Avenue has maintained since before the city annexed it.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this shows up on a city services map. Manhattan Beach doesn't budget for First Thursday, and the surf contest isn't a municipal event. If you live in El Porto, the thing that makes your ten blocks feel distinct from downtown isn't a park or a plan, it's a small rotating cast of business owners who keep choosing to underwrite the neighborhood's social calendar out of their own storefronts. That's a fragile kind of infrastructure by design. It depends on people staying in business and choosing to keep showing up.
It's also, for now, working. The mural is new. The contest is in its fifth year and still growing its sponsor list. First Thursday is still pulling in the same names it started with. If you've never walked down to the shop on a Thursday evening or shown up to the January contest, that's the local calendar worth putting on your own.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this means for a home you already own, or you're curious how a place with this much unbudgeted community infrastructure tends to hold its value over time, Liz Bird Fine Homes knows this stretch of Highland Avenue well. Let's Connect.