Pier into the future: on the edge of the deep blue is a green modern marvel preserving the past.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: PICTURE THIS

The cobia are still scrappy, the spots still good eating. Otherwise, Warren Jennette might not recognize the Nags Head fishing pier that bears his name. Where the Elizabeth City fruit and produce wholesaler built his of untreated wood in 1939, a steel-reinforced concrete wonder, featuring wind power and geothermal heating, stretches 1,000 feet into the ocean. The new pier preserves a pastime the old one, and those like it, nurtured. "As recently as the mid-1990s, North Carolina had 36--a quarter of piers from the tip of Maine to south Texas," General Manager Mike Remige says. "By the early 2000s, that had dropped to 18. The culture is disappearing." Reopened in May 2011, jennette's Pier helps hold the line as soaring real-estate values and vicious storms claim others.

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Developers were on the verge of building luxury condos here, too. "There was a local public outcry" Remige says, "to preserve what was seen as a vanished part of the culture." The North Carolina Aquarium Society, the nonprofit arm of the aquariums division of the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources, wrangled a $4.6 million grant from the state to buy it in 2003. That September, Hurricane Isabel clobbered the coast, knocking out more than 500 feet of the pier. It closed two seasons later, but the Aquarium Society had a plan: rebuild the pier for educational, as well as recreational, use. Construction began in 2009 and cost $25 million. Perched on concrete pilings, some as long as 80 feet, it's designed to withstand a Category 3 hurricane's 135 mph winds.

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The state picked up the tab and the deed. The aquariums division employs Remige and eight others to run the pier, which attracted more than a half-million visitors in the fiscal year ended June 30. Though it's supposed to be self-supporting...