BOOSTING SAN PEDRO

Nicolai Ouroussoff’s preference for a downtown location for the Southern California Institute of Architecture is understandable, but shortsighted (“A Tricky Move,” Oct. 4). He disapproves of a detached location and describes my hometown of San Pedro--one possible site--as having banal housing in a surreal landscape. True. But how did we get this way?

Pictures of the harbor early in the century show a thriving community. Then the fishing industry collapsed, and the Slavs and Italians looked for jobs elsewhere; foreign competition took away shipbuilding, leaving us a huge abandoned shipyard; peace closed the fort and made needless the Navy housing; and automation turned the harbor into a people-less landscape. San Pedro lost its character.

Now, isn’t our identity crisis, our forced suburbanization, just the sort of problem faced by most American towns and cities? Would it be wrong for architectural students to be giving San Pedro revitalization some thought?

DAN HEALY

San Pedro