GARIBALDI -- Set 760 feet out over a stretch of 100 pilings on Tillamook Bay, the little wood building has captured the curious gaze of passersby for more than eight decades. It's served as retail space, living quarters and was even offered up for private sale.

But in the beginning, the Pier's End Boathouse saved lives. Known then as the U.S. Coast Guard Lifeboat Station, the boathouse and its crew were a mariner's best hope when the seas turned perilous.

Now, the boathouse is the focus of the Garibaldi Cultural Heritage Initiative, a nonprofit formed in 2015 with the mission "to restore and meaningfully use Pier's End." To do so will require money and time, neither of which they have an abundance.

"The harsh marine environment wears day and night on the structure," said Kristen Penner, board president for the initiative. "If we have to replace most or many of the pilings, the cost could likely soar to several million dollars. Engineering bids alone to assess the pilings have ranged from $80,000 to $100,000."

The lifeboat station was built in 1936 and ready to serve its mission the following year. The station featured three marine rails leading into Tillamook Bay and space for two 36-foot motor lifeboats and one 26-foot oar-powered lifeboat.

When called to duty, crew members rolled the boat into the water, serving an area about 50 miles out to sea from near Pacific City to Tillamook Rock. Once they returned from a rescue, the crew winched the boat back inside.

But times soon changed as the Coast Guard moved to larger, steel boats that didn't need to be pulled from the water. The boathouse, long a curiosity visible from U.S. 101, was decommissioned in the 1960s and eventually sold to the Port of Garibaldi.

Its future has been a question for much of the time since, but there's been little doubt of its meaning to the community.

"It's a landmark," said Mike Saindon, retired master chief of Station Tillamook Bay, which oversaw the boathouse. "A lot of these small communities along Washington and Oregon coast became what they are based on the Coast Guard stations. Some of these small communities didn't have electricity until it came out for the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is entwined in the history of these communities and their development."

There was no plan to preserve the building when Saindon was named manager of the port in 2014.

"The future of the boathouse was really up in the air," Saindon said.

The 3,900-square-foot building -- with one open downstairs room, one upstairs room and two restrooms -- was in good structural shape, but needed cleaning up, he said.

"I started reaching out to some folks to look at other alternatives," Saindon said. "It had great potential for education and tourism. Once it got going, it took on a life of its own."

Soon the grass-roots effort involved business people, educators, port officials, history buffs and residents, like Mike Arseneault, who didn't want to see the icon go away.

"I fell in love with it the first time I drove through Garibaldi," said Arseneault, who moved to the area a year ago after retiring from Nike and now volunteers with the initiative as a marketing consultant. "I love working with something people have such a connection to. We don't have buildings like this, and once it's gone, it's gone. If it falls into the bay it is not going to be coming back."

Three years ago, the port agreed to a public/private partnership with the initiative allowing it use of the boathouse for a $1 a year. The group is working now to assess its structural integrity and a plan for raising money to do the necessary work.

Penner acknowledged that it will be impossible to build a new boathouse under contemporary zoning and regulations.

"But it is possible to repair it, and there are some innovative models across the country for restoring historic structures and piers," she said. "We are just at the beginning of this work, doing what we can to clean up the building, raise awareness and build programs that support the work and our mission of promoting the unique culture and heritage of our coastal region."

Val Folkema remembers the boathouse from childhood when her family frequently visited the area from Portland. It was the boathouse that inspired a nearby wayside and interpretive signs, she said.

"The boathouse had always been the most iconic photograph of that place," said Folkema, now chairwoman of the port's Board of Commissioners. "Folks are just enamored with that pier. We get kids out on boats and they see the Pier's End from out on the bay. The marina works with marine biology classes. We can hold organized tourism visits. It could be an interpretive center.

"It would be a really great place for kayak launching, a museum of sorts that honors the Coast Guard's presence and to host workshops, like trades that have almost vanished like shipwrights," she said.

A recent kayak-building class in the boathouse attracted participants from Portland. They returned later to help finish the boats, which will be used in future programming, Penner said. A $2,300 grant from the Tillamook County Cultural Coalition will be used to install gallery lighting, with future plans including a showing of vintage and current photographs, possibly as early as spring.

While the boathouse is the star attraction, the pier — more than two football fields long — has plenty of fans in its own right.

Open year-round through an agreement between the city of Garibaldi, the port and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the pier features seven disabled accessible turnouts for people in wheelchairs, concrete stairs to the shoreline, a parking area and restrooms.

It's the place to go for fishing, crabbing and viewing sealife and wildlife. It's also the place where the more adventurous head to when the Oregon coast weather blows up a storm. Just hold on to the sturdy railings.

"When it's really nasty, you just want to go out and see it and be in it," Folkema said. "If you are on the pier and the wind is strong and blowing from the southwest, you face west and lean against it and the wind will hold you up. That's how we meditate."

-- Lori Tobias

Special to The Oregonian/OregonLive