L.A. Drops Plans to Designate Heinz Cannery a Historic Site

The Los Angeles City Council has scrapped plans to designate one of the port’s oldest canneries a historical monument, deciding instead that a new museum or plaza should launch waterfront development in Wilmington.

The 12-0 decision, urged by Harbor-area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, clears the way for razing Wilmington’s old Heinz pet food cannery, a once-bustling facility that traces its history to a one-story shed built in 1914.

The council’s action also puts the city and Harbor Department on record supporting the concept of a new commercial endeavor along Wilmington’s waterfront, which for years has been overlooked by the port in favor of seaside development in San Pedro.

Just how the council and port will bring new commerce to Wilmington, however, remains uncertain.

“We just have to trust them,” said Wilmington’s Gertrude Schwab, a member of a port advisory board on seaside development.

The fate of the cannery, at 545 S. Fries Ave., began to draw wide interest last year when Heinz announced it would close the two-acre facility, allowing the port to add the property to its vast construction and maintenance yard.

With the community clamoring for some waterfront development and the cannery awaiting demolition, Flores last August moved to designate the facility a city historic monument. The designation, later approved by the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission, was aimed at prodding the port into saving the cannery long enough to see if it should become a part of a long-proposed waterfront development in Wilmington.

After reports indicated that restoring the old, asbestos-filled cannery would be costly and cumbersome, Flores, port officials and community representatives continued to study the possibility of waterfront development in Wilmington. In January, RTKL Associates Inc., a Baltimore-based consulting firm whose projects include the successful Baltimore Place, outlined several proposals for Wilmington, among them an $11-million development of offices, restaurants and shops along Fries Avenue.

The council’s action Tuesday does not ensure that those specific proposals will move forward, but does include the port’s pledge that a commercial development will result from the wrangling over the cannery.

“We now have a consensus in developing a seed project that will have some historical components and some recognition of the port, the community and the canning industry,” the port’s Dwayne Lee, deputy executive director of development, said after the council’s action.

But Lee cautioned that the details of the project--its location, scope, start-up date and cost--have yet to be decided.

“I wouldn’t want to call it more than a concept at this point,” he said.

Lee’s remarks are at odds with Flores’ spirited description Tuesday of what awaits the Wilmington waterfront now that the fate of the cannery has been decided. Indeed, during a brief council discussion, Flores spoke of a port history museum, with simulated cranes and other equipment, as well as a waterfront plaza--similar to one in Alexandria, Va.--for artists and their studios.

“Those are a couple of the things we are considering,” Flores told her colleagues.

Moreover, Flores said the council’s action would ensure that the cannery’s most important legacy--its equipment--would remain in the port.

“The part about the cannery that’s going to be preserved is really the important part . . . and that is to actually go in and see the cans moving overhead into the sterilizing, the labeling,” Flores said. “And all of the things that have such an intricate history tied with up with that community will be preserved, will be in a building,” she said.

How that will be accomplished also remains uncertain.

Since the cannery’s closure, most of its conveyors and other equipment have been removed, according to members of the Wilmington advisory committee.

“The big stuff is gone,” said Schwab, who toured the facility recently with other committee members. The committee has collected some smaller historical items, such as scales and desks, from the facility.

Heinz officials could not be reached for comment, but Schwab said she understands much of the heavy equipment has been sold to a cannery in Phoenix.

In any case, she and other Wilmington advisory committee members endorsed the council’s action, figuring it at least focuses new attention on their dream of a waterfront occupied by restaurants and shops, not warehouses and construction yards.

“It’s sad to see this (cannery) go,” Schwab said. “However, I’m against preserving this structure” at the risk of losing the port’s support for a commercial development.

Added committee Chairman George De La Torre: “This moves us in the direction we want to go . . . but we still have to get the project off the ground.”