On Friday evening, about a year since it opened, my wife Julia and I took a walk along Mount Pleasant's Memorial Park Pier to see how it is approaching the important and elusive goal of becoming someplace.

A lot of East Cooper isn't headed in that direction.

It would be difficult to argue the community lost much when the Coleman Blvd. Burger King closed. An awful lot of what has been built and made here in our lifetimes simply never becomes somewhere. The architecture is often stamped out of generic standards and dropped along our roadways. The roads themselves tend towards monotony.

The Waterfront Park represents a determined attempt to move the community in the other direction. The playground equipment, landscape design and buildings all work hard to amplify what is unique about our area.

We found the pier busy with visitors. Most were walking along the broad, car free promenade towards the pier head. The swings were full. Above our heads, the low rumble of bridge traffic wasn't intrusive.

We met a family of visitors from Hendersonville, SC who were trying to catch crabs using a brand new pyramid trap. It wouldn't close. We showed them how to feed the string through the collar to pull the four sides together and turn the contraption into a functional trap. They had also brought some fishing rods to try the water for fish with cut bait and sinkers.

They started fishing. We continued down the pier.

While the pier was sold as a tourism facility, mostly locals use it. On a warm summer night, most of the action is talk. Couples and families share their stories with each other. There's some hand holding. It's pretty quiet as people who care about one another share the large space of the outdoors.

Hard realities do intrude. A portable bathroom trailer is parked out near the end of the dock. There are bathrooms in the café building where the dock meets the land, but that can be a long way from where the need to relieve can manifest itself on the long pier.

The trailer is nicer than a porta pottie. It probably frustrates the people who conceived the attractive design for the pier. I'm sure they groan when they see the trailer, but no objection is likely to override the delight of the people who find it when they really need it.

We found fishermen enjoying the evening. The casual fisherman at the pier usually brings cut bait and a sinker. This virtually guarantees catching something weird and inedible. We saw one man pull out a dog fish, a miniature shark which looks fearsome when you need to go near it with your fingers to pry a hook out of its tiny mouth. Other people pulled up small skates and rays. The family from Hendersonville hooked into a puffer fish. There are places where people eat these things, but on the Mount Pleasant pier such catch is usually assured a quick return to the waters of the Charleston Harbor.

A member of the grounds keeping crew assured me that with the right rig and bait trout, sheep head and other highly desirable fish are pulled from the water. The kids clearly enjoy the spiny, inedible weirdness more.

The Town and Parks crews who maintain the park have kept the new facility clean and attractive. People clearly feel safe and welcome there.

As memories accumulate, the pier is on its way to becoming a valued place in East Cooper community. By becoming a place we've been, it evolves as a place to be.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'On Village. This week marks the tenth anniversary of this column.)