Dogtown is an area of West Los Angeles - the poorer, slum area on the south side of Santa Monica that covered Venice Beach and Ocean Park Beaches.
Throughout the 1970's, the surfers in Dogtown were aggressive and antisocial. They fit into the stereotype of the time that surfers were poor dropouts. For a lot of these young people, surfing was all they had.
Surfing at The Cove
Right between Venice beach and Santa Monica was an abandoned amusement park right on the water called the Pacific Ocean Park Pier. The locals called it the P-O-P. In the middle of the POP was an area where the huge wood pilings and rickety piers were built in a U shape, creating a kind of secret cove. And that's what the locals called it - "The Cove." It was an incredibly dangerous place to surf, with large tilted wood pilings jutting from the watter, and not enough room for all the surfers.