The first visible signs of the resurrection of the long dormant beach club at 415 Pacific Coast Highway were scheduled to rise Monday morning, signaling a new chapter in its long, tangled history.

Sixteen monumental white pillars that are meant to evoke the iconic white columns of the original Marion Davies estate were to l be installed over a two- day period, Each of the 29-foot tall pillars was pre-cast off-site from a special brilliant white concrete mixture.

The estate was built in the late 1920s by publishing titan William Randolph Hearst for his mistress, actress Marion Davies. Its centerpiece was the 100-room mansion designed by noted architect Julia Morgan. Davies was renowned as Hollywood’s first “screwball” comedienne, and her estate was the largest and most opulent on the Southern California beach, and was, in effect, Hollywood’s own beach club..

Davies sold the estate in 1937, and the main house became a hotel for a time. After it was demolished in the 1950s. the property was purchased by the State of California and leased to the private Sand and Sea Club. The City of Santa Monica, which manages the property for the state, cancelled the club’s lease at the end of the 1980s and operated it as a public beach facility until the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, when it was damaged, red-tagged by the City, and shut down,

In 1998, the City spent $180.000 on a plan for the site, but shelved it. In 2005, as the City was about to seek a private company to restore and operate the site, Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation came to the rescue and gave the City a $21 million grant “for the reuse and rehabilitation of the site as a public beach facility.”

The decades-long deterioration of the of the property left few remnants of the original estate. The new pillars are meant to tie new features with old site elements.

Set on the west side of the new pool house, the pillars will repeat the spacing and orientation of the original columns.

Other project elements include the original Davies guest house and swimming pool, gardens, a beach café, volleyball nets and beach tennis courts.

The Annenberg Community Beach Club will to open to the public in 2009.