Walk up to the chain link at 33rd and Bell on any weekday morning and you'll see the same thing you saw almost two years ago: a laminated rendering, a little sun bleached now, zip tied to the fence where the city posted it after the council meeting. Somewhere in a drawer at City Hall is a construction document that turns that rendering into a Spanish style restroom building, a wider tot lot, and a fence with a lace pattern cut into the iron. None of it exists yet. The sand dune is still the sand dune. The 208 steps are still the 208 steps. If you've been climbing this hill since before the vote, the park you use today is functionally identical to the one you used in 2023.

That gap between what got approved and what got built is the actual story here, and it's one the tourist write-ups never mention because they're written by people who visited once, not people who've been checking the reservation app every Tuesday for a decade.

The Argument Is Older Than the App

The dune itself predates almost everything around it. Residents built the park in 1964 on top of what had been a dump site, one of the last visible remnants of the sand hills that used to run through this stretch of the South Bay before most of them were graded flat or shipped out for development. For decades it stayed a neighborhood secret with a playground attached.

It stopped being a secret sometime in the 2000s, when word got around that the 100-foot slope was one of the best free stair climbers in Los Angeles County. By 2009 the crowds had grown large enough that neighbors on the surrounding blocks were formally asking the city to shut it down, citing noise, traffic, and outsiders treating a residential street like a parking lot. The city closed the dune, fenced it, and spent the better part of a year negotiating a reopening. When it came back in August 2010, it came back with a reservation system, a fee, and an attendant checking IDs at the gate. That basic architecture, pay to enter, one hour at a time, has not changed since.

Founding CORE (Citizens for Outdoor Recreation and Exercise) member Bill Hory pushed back on the new rules at the time, and then-mayor Mitch Ward acknowledged the tension directly, calling it "not a perfect situation." Sixteen years later, it still isn't, which is a big part of why the 2024 redesign fight over a bike path felt so familiar to anyone who'd lived through the first one.

The Rules Regulars Already Know, and the One Everyone Forgets

Most people who use the dune regularly have the basics memorized, but the fine print still catches people off guard:

• Reservations are required for anyone 13 and older, one hour per day per patron, and must be booked online through the city, never by phone or in person at City Hall.
• The fee is $1 per hour for Manhattan Beach residents and $3 for non-residents, unchanged in structure since the reservation system began.
• Capacity is capped at 20 people on the dune at any given time.
• Kids 12 and under can use the dune and family play area on a walk-up basis, no reservation needed, under the city's own park rules.
• The 208 wooden steps alongside the dune are free and unrestricted, but jogging on them is prohibited. Signs say so. The fine for ignoring them is real.
• Monthly memberships have been available since January 2015 for people who use the dune often enough that booking individually stopped making sense.

The detail people forget is the fenced-off patch on the north ridge. That's not decorative. A rare native wildflower called Orcutt's yellow pincushion was newly discovered growing there in the spring of 2010, the same season a second regional population turned up at the Ballona Wetlands. It's why that corner of the slope has stayed roped off years after the rest of the controversy died down.

The Bike Path That Didn't Survive One Meeting

The 2024 redesign started with two competing concepts from landscape architects David Volz Design, both preserving the existing trees, both widening the playground into separate zones for toddlers and older kids, both replacing the aging restroom with something more modern. The meaningful difference was a proposed six-foot concrete path along the park's eastern edge, wide enough for bikes to cut through on their way somewhere else.

Parents whose kids play soccer and tag on the south lawn showed up to oppose it. The worry wasn't abstract: a paved through-route meant faster bike traffic crossing a lawn full of running kids. When the council took up the plan on September 17, 2024, they voted 5-0 to approve the rest of the master plan and cut the bike path entirely.

"It's a great day. Manhattan Beach is getting a spectacular updated park."

That's Parks and Recreation Commission member Larry Zimbalist, quoted after the vote. Councilmember David Lesser noted that the whole renovation push had come from the community in the first place, which made stripping out the one piece residents didn't want an easy call rather than a fight.

What survived the vote: new playground equipment split into a tot lot and a space for ages 5 to 12, an outdoor education area with a low wooden stage for school groups, a pedestrian lighting system meant to improve nighttime security, two new prefabricated buildings in a Spanish style to house restrooms and a small office, and that lace-patterned iron fence, funded separately through the city's public arts program rather than the general capital budget. Total estimated cost: $3.5 million.

Nearly Two Years Later, Still a Rendering

Here's where the park's own paper trail gets interesting. The city's Parks Master Plan page, which tracks every capital project from concept to completion, lists Sand Dune Park's redesign not as complete but as a project whose next steps are "development of construction documents and additional funding allocations." In plain terms: the drawings need to be finalized into something a contractor can actually build from, and the city hasn't locked in all the money yet.

Compare that to what did get finished in the same stretch of years, using the same master plan as the source:

The landscape work that preceded the redesign vote actually did get finished, and it was substantial. Public works crews pruned 294 trees, removed 38 that were dead or diseased, and hauled off nearly 100 tons of dead plant material in the first phase. The second phase planted roughly 320 new trees and shrubs, stabilized four hillsides with jute netting, and swapped about 6,300 square feet of turf for decomposed granite, all using native species chosen to avoid disrupting the migratory birds that pass through. That part of the story is genuinely done. The playground, the restrooms, and the fence are the parts still sitting in a drawer.

The Other Dune You Might Be Thinking Of

If you've seen headlines this year about dune restoration in Manhattan Beach, there's a good chance it's not about this park at all. A separate project run by The Bay Foundation, in partnership with the city and the California State Coastal Conservancy, has been rebuilding roughly three acres of actual beach dune along the shoreline between 36th and 23rd Streets since January 2022. That's sand fencing and native plantings on the beach itself, meant to buffer the coastline against storms and sea level rise, and it has nothing to do with the fenced hillside at Bell Avenue where people go to work out. Two different projects, two different agencies, one confusing shared word.

For the people who actually use the Bell Avenue dune three mornings a week, none of that changes the routine. The fee is still a dollar. The reservation window is still an hour. The 208 steps are still free if the sand feels like too much that day. What's changed is that everyone now knows a $3.5 million version of this park exists on paper, and the honest answer to "when's it happening" is: not yet, and not on a schedule the city has published.

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