Winds of Change Blow Through L.A’s Harbor Area : San Pedro: Even as fishing and canning industries have declined, new residents have been attracted to community’s location by the sea.

Bill Olesen was 8-years-old when he arrived by train at San Pedro’s waterfront in 1912.

His eyes sparkle as he recalls the steam locomotive puffing to a halt at the water’s edge on the very spot where the Los Angeles Maritime Museum now stands and where Olesen now volunteers as harbor historian.

“My mother and I came to join my father who was a lumber ship port captain here,” said the former shipbuilder and commercial fisherman, whose home on Barton Hill was purchased by his Danish-born parents in 1919.

“San Pedro in those days was a quaint place largely populated by seafaring immigrants, and I was fascinated with the dockside activity,” Olesen said.

The fascination with San Pedro (called simply “Pee-dro” by longtime residents) holds true as well for newcomers to the seaside community where wood-framed bungalows and small Spanish and English Tudor homes nestle on the slopes of the Palos Verdes hills at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, caressed by a nearly constant on-shore breeze.

Named for St. Peter, the bishop of Alexandria in the 2nd Century, San Pedro is the end of the Harbor Freeway and about 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles--a distance that provides welcome isolation from the urban center for an estimated 76,000 residents.

Karen Lemons, an advertising executive who made a career move from Kansas in 1985, settled in San Pedro because it was where she could afford to buy. She owns a condo unit in the Vista del Oro area but is now looking for a small, older home as a way of trading up.

Lemons may have to pay between $250,000 and $400,000 for a house, depending on location. “I’ve put my condo on the market, but it’s been slow to sell because the condo market in San Pedro is currently oversupplied,” she said.

Her reason for buying another property in San Pedro has now less to do with affordability and more to do with living in a pleasant environment with its own individuality.

“San Pedro is a melting pot where you find all kinds of ethnic cultures,” she said. “I like the mixture of architectural styles that you find here and the fact that the community is built on a hillside and has more view property than any other beach city in the South Bay area.”

The area’s history is rich with accounts that date back to 1542 when explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo first entered its bay, and with romantic tales of mission settlers in the 1700s, of pirates and smugglers who used San Pedro Bay for illicit trade, and later of catalysts like Phineas Banning, who sparked early development of the present harbor.

San Pedro, which enjoys the lowest crime rate of any community in the city of Los Angeles, was incorporated in 1888, but its residents voted for annexation to Los Angeles in 1909 to facilitate management of the port. Shortly after the construction of Angel’s Gate breakwater in 1912, military protection was added with the establishment of Ft. MacArthur.

Shipbuilding and canning--traditional local industries that played a major role at the turn of the century and through the 1930s--have declined over the past two decades. At San Pedro’s recent Fisherman’s Fiesta, it was apparent that its commercial fishing fleet had also dwindled dramatically--from 300 to 30 boats.

Even so, the waterfront remains the domain of real-life fishermen who daily tend their nets after a night at sea, filling the air with the pungent odor of freshly caught fish.

At Cabrillo Beach Marina--the new focus of the community--idle pleasure crafts await their weekend sailors, and beyond, cruise ships signal their tugboat escorts for entry to Worldport L.A., one of the world’s busiest harbors.

Bob Bradarich, the 39-year-old president of the San Pedro Board of Realtors and owner of RE/MAX Seapoint, grew up in San Pedro during the 1950s and ‘60s.

“It was a bit different then,” he recalled. “It seemed as if every other person in town was either an uncle or a cousin. The most fun was when my granddad took us kids sardine fishing. He was a commercial fisherman from Yugoslavia who settled here in the early 1900s.”

Yugoslavs and Italians, fishing families most of them, have been close-knit and have intermarried, Bradarich said. They still form the bulk of San Pedro’s population mix.

“I’M YUGO,” seen on the license plate of a passing car attests to a competitive pride among groups that make up the ethnic diversity in the community--Yugoslavs, Italians, Serbo-Croatians, Portuguese, Scandinavians, Russians, Greeks, Britons and Latinos.

The small homes built by early settlers on the hillside folds above San Pedro Bay provide the primary source of housing.

Frank (Ray) Falk of Anchor Realty, who’s been selling homes in the area for almost 27 years, has seen housing prices soar in San Pedro. But he adds that if one compares them with prices for comparable properties in nearby seaside communities, San Pedro’s homes are still affordable.

“One can still find a small home for $180,000 or $190,000, on the northeast corner of town, even though in some areas, it’s gotten a bit ridiculous. But I believe prices will flatten out,” Falk said.

Real estate sales figures for the past 12 months show about a 15% decrease in property prices.

Another trend seen during the past seven years, has been an onslaught of condominium construction of three- to 300-unit projects. The reason is that too many developers rushed in to build apartment projects just before a moratorium went into effect last year to curb the indiscriminate tearing down of older homes and landmark buildings.

Rentals in San Pedro range from $750 to $1,200 for two-bedroom condominiums and $800 to $1,500 for two-bedroom homes.

Marci Petrich, a first-time home buyer as a single parent, recently purchased a two-bedroom condominium in an area adjoining Rancho Palos Verdes, where units in her building are priced from $200,000 to $250,000. High-end prices are usually for hillside properties with views.

“My roots are here, so I can appreciate how the housing picture in San Pedro has changed,” she said. “In 1974, while I was still married, my husband and I bought a three-bedroom home in the Vista del Oro area for $40,000. That same house is now worth six times as much.”

Florence and Bill Culpert built their home in San Pedro 40 years ago. “The cost of construction in 1950 was $8 a square foot.” said Culpert, a former yacht broker. “Current building costs now run anywhere from $60 to more than $100 a square foot.”

The Culperts live in the Palisades, a neighborhood once surrounded by Army and Navy installations. Today, the only remaining military presence at Ft. MacArthur is the U.S. Air Force, Culpert said.

“When Florence and I moved here, San Pedro was the pits. There were no stores or restaurants to speak of. People like us moved here because the land values were so low. San Pedro was never a fashionable place to live, but that too is changing,” Culpert said.

The Palisades, Point Fermin, Southshore and Vista del Oro today are considered the preferred neighborhoods of San Pedro.

Other identifiable neighborhoods include Vinegar Hill, where an effort is under way to save post-Victorian homes built during the heyday of that district a century ago; Barton Hill, one of the earliest residential areas; the Latino barrio that has developed below Pacific Avenue, and a corridor commonly known as Shoestring Strip, that links San Pedro to the rest of Los Angeles.

Largely untouched by the surge of coastal development in the ‘60s and ‘70s, San Pedro’s older business district fell into decay in the 1950s, though in the past 10 years it has undergone a slow but continual revitalization.

The increased interest by investors in San Pedro’s potential for development has been a matter of concern to members of the San Pedro Bay Historical Society, who were moved to take inventory of the community’s historical and cultural landmarks after entire blocks in the center of town had been leveled for redevelopment.

“We have so much history worth protecting,” said Flora Baker, a past president of the group and well-known local historian.

“We don’t want to see picturesque or valuable old homes and buildings being replaced with blocks of condominiums. There has to be some care in where these projects are built so as not to overshadow the aura of Old San Pedro that is so precious to our heritage.”

Gary and Lynn Larson, owners of the San Pedro Bay Co., and Marylyn Ginsburg, a former art teacher turned real estate developer, have invested boldly in the renovation of several older structures.

The 70-year-old Arcade Building on 6th Street, built by an Italian fishing broker and patterned after a “galleria” in Naples, has been painstakingly restored by the Larson family and is 100% leased by small businesses.

Ginsburg’s Grand House restaurant with its garden patio and adjacent bed-and-breakfast cottages on Grand Street is another creative example of adaptive reuse of one of the vintage residences. Both developers have been singled out for preservation awards by the Los Angeles Conservancy.

Fran and Sam Botwin, 40-year residents of San Pedro, care a great deal about the quality of life in San Pedro.

“We’ve been seeing some very positive signs everywhere,” said Fran Botwin. “In my wildest dreams I never thought we’d see a high-rise in this town. But we have it now (the 11-story Pacific Place office tower), plus several new hotels,” she added.

A new Sheraton Hotel opened in the spring in the Beacon Street area, once the rough haunt of sailors on leave that now also houses the World Cruise Center, second only to Miami in passenger ship traffic.

Waterfront attractions are numerous. Ports O’Call Village brings in more than 1 million visitors a year and the new Compri Hotel in the marina will soon be joined by a 250-room Doubletree Hotel when Phase 2 of Cabrillo Beach Marina is completed. The expansion, currently under development will add another 2,000 boat slips and three new major restaurants.

Sam Botwin, who is honorary mayor of San Pedro and one of the organizers of the San Pedro Peninsula Homeowners’ Coalition, singled out traffic congestion as the No. 1 problem for the town:

“We have an increasing number of the people on the Hill (Palos Verdes Peninsula) who come down through the southern part of town into Western Avenue to get on to the Harbor Freeway. But with some cooperation, we should be able to alleviate that problem.”

AT A GLANCE Population 1990 estimate: 77.068 1980-90 change: 18.5% Median age: 31.4 years Annual income Per capita: 15,623 Median household: 37,696 Household distribution Less than $15,000: 19.0% $15,000 - $30,000: 21.1% $30,000 - $50,000: 24.2% $50,000 - $75,000: 20.4% $75,000 +: 15.1%