Marlin Club

On our lists of the best activities and arcades & games in Los Angeles.

Merchant Marines stationed on Catalina built the bar in 1946 to look like the bow of a boat, and after the war Bud Upton covered the walls with an Art Deco seascape, so a stool at the rail puts you on the seafloor beside a sunken ship. The blue building dates to 1905, a fish market downstairs with a boarding house above where Norma Jeane Baker lived in 1942, before she was Marilyn Monroe. It has run as the Marlin Club since 1952, with a pool table, foosball and a jukebox, steps from the Green Pier.