SPECIAL REPORT * A wave of renewal has transformed old waterfronts on both coasts, but . . . San Pedro Still Awaits Its Renaissance

Almost four decades of urban renewal have transformed the decaying waterfronts of Boston, Baltimore, Miami, New Orleans, Seattle, Monterey, San Diego and Long Beach, but not San Pedro.

Despite panoramic views, diverse ethnicity and picturesque hills, a revitalization effort under way since the 1960s has yet to spark the economic renaissance repeatedly forecast by San Pedro’s business and political leaders.

Instead of marketplaces, historic gas-lamp districts and waterfront restaurants teeming with patrons, redevelopment in L.A.’s port town of 75,000 has produced only a smattering of modest projects since former City Councilman John S. Gibson Jr. heralded its first steps.

To be sure, the seedy honky-tonks, tattoo parlors and bordellos on Beacon Street are gone. There is the successful Cabrillo Marina, built by the port, and a couple of resurgent blocks gussied up by determined shopkeepers. But nothing has generated the critical mass of visitors needed to sustain retail development and tourist-oriented business on a broad scale.

Community activists, development consultants, and government officials attribute the dearth of progress to an uncoordinated, piecemeal approach that has lacked both vision and a master plan. After decades of effort and the investment of at least $200 million in public and private funds, San Pedro is still talked about in terms of its “potential.”

Tensions between citizens, harbor officials and the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency have dogged the undertaking for years. And the only effort to unify the fractious parties and draft a master plan ran into opposition from City Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr. in 1998.

“I love the area,” said Harrison Price, a San Pedro-based attractions consultant who has worked for Disney, Six Flags, MCA and Anheuser-Busch, which own theme parks. “The waterfront can be a major destination for people. The fact that redevelopment has been stymied here for almost 40 years is a sad story.”

The Sheraton Hotel, once called a key to revitalization, has been sold twice over the last 10 years at losses of millions of dollars to its previous owners. The first builder lost $16 million alone.

There is the $2.5-million Mesa Car Park, pushed by former City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores in the early 1990s. It is a lightly used parking lot that cost about $50,000 a space to build. Studies indicate that cheaper alternatives were available and that the lot might not have been needed in the first place.

The Croatian Cultural Center--its metal doors scratched with gang writing and secured with padlocks--sits unfinished in a gutted bank building the city bought in 1997. Restoration of the 1930 Warner Grand Theater and its Art Deco facade isn’t done either.

Pacific Place, a modern office building, is struggling to fill its retail space. The structure’s main tenant, Logicon, simply moved out of its old office tower next door, leaving it vacant for years. Its huge “AVAILABLE” sign dominates San Pedro’s skyline.

Plans for Hotels Fall Apart

Not far away are the LaSalle and West hotels, two rundown buildings on 7th Street. Two years ago, the redevelopment agency bought them and an adjoining lot for $1.9 million from the locally prominent Papadakis family. Court records show that the agency acquired the property when the Papadakises were in default on the La Salle’s $1.5-million note and facing foreclosure.

The hotels were not part of San Pedro’s redevelopment plans until the family, with the support of Councilman Svorinich, offered the property to the redevelopment agency. A proposal to turn the hotels into low- and moderate-income housing fell apart late last year.

Several projects involving the Port of Los Angeles haven’t fared much better. Ports o’ Call Village, a harbor-side cluster of struggling shops and restaurants, has been run so poorly that harbor officials went to court to force out its longtime manager and leaseholder.

Last year, harbor officials were disappointed by a lack of interest from builders in redeveloping Ports o’ Call, as well as the harbor’s aging cruise ship terminal and a large parcel off 22nd Street.

More recently, San Pedro had counted on Regal Cinemas to finally provide the catalyst for renewal. But after several years of planning, a deal to build a 14-screen multiplex at 6th and Centre streets collapsed in October when Regal pulled out amid a downturn in the theater business.

Now, the redevelopment agency, local residents and Svorinich, who is running for state Assembly, are scrambling to find another use for the lot, which has been vacant since 1970.

“Nothing has ever caught fire,” said Janet Schaaf-Gunter, a San Pedro businesswoman, property owner and community activist. “It’s all pretty disheartening. We have no leadership, no energy and no plan. We are stuck here while other cities have done wonderful things with their waterfronts.”

Like Baltimore Harbor. Redevelopment began there in the 1960s--about the same time it started in San Pedro. An initial investment of about $40 million built the National Aquarium and Harborplace, which is a pair of block-long, two-story shopping pavilions with translucent walls.

During its first year of operation, Harborplace attracted 18 million visitors, generated $42 million in retail sales and created 2,300 jobs. The project triggered a renewal of Baltimore Harbor that continues to this day.

In contrast, redevelopment in San Pedro had yet to build a successful project when Harborplace opened in August 1980. At the time, more than 200 buildings had been razed along Beacon Street and several residential and office projects were on the books. Ports o’ Call was attracting about a million visitors a year.

Overall, the redevelopment agency has worked on roughly 10 Beacon Street area projects, including 300 units of housing, several office buildings, street improvements and the Sheraton.

The Harbor Department built the 1,200-slip Cabrillo Marina on the West Channel plus an adjacent hotel, one of the more successful recreational developments in the area.

On the other hand, Ports o’ Call has languished for years, despite its waterfront address. From 1989 to 1998, revenue fell drastically, from $25.5 million to $8.2 million a year. The vacancy rate climbed from 8% to almost 50%.

Urban planners say successful waterfront developments offer the public ample access to the water, whereas the layout of San Pedro’s faux fishing village acts more like a wall along the shoreline.

Port officials also have had difficulty finding a use for the vacant Unocal property off 22nd Street. Almost a decade ago, a large aquarium was proposed for the 30-acre site, but Long Beach moved faster on the idea, and the neighboring city opened the Aquarium of the Pacific in 1998.

“We would have liked to accomplish more,” said Barry Glickman, chief of staff for Svorinich. “The ingredients are in place for a turnaround. But we still need a magnet to get the people here.”

Svorinich declined to comment on the progress of redevelopment in his district.

Views Offer Interesting Backdrop

Among San Pedro’s attributes are good views from town and the harbor’s main channel with its constant ship traffic and cargo operations--an interesting backdrop, urban planners say, for restaurants and large-scale retail development.

On 6th and 7th streets, shop owners, landlords and restaurateurs have fixed up their buildings and storefronts with a few million dollars in federal block grants. There are coffeehouses, brew pubs and antique stores. The vacancy rate is dropping.

“The area is moving in the right direction,” said Andrew Silber, who owns the Whale and Ale restaurant. “It is a small pocket of improvement. Little things have made a difference here.”

Since reopening in 1998, the 70-year-old Warner theater, once a haven for the homeless, has been the stage for the band Cubanismo, the Moscow Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic--events that attracted good-size audiences.

But few events have turned a profit for the 1,500-seat venue, and substantial improvements still need to be made to the theater’s structure and stage equipment.

The port’s cruise ship terminal has potential as well, residents say, if only San Pedro can tap into the tourist dollars of the 500,000 Carnival and Royal Caribbean passengers who embark from the facility every year. That might be difficult.

Last year in a local survey of cruise line operators, Carnival and Royal Caribbean executives perceived the area as unsafe for passengers and ranked it at the very bottom of port towns. Carnival is considering relocating its two Los Angeles-based ships to Long Beach.

Part of the problem, critics say, is that San Pedro does not have the right mix of projects that appeal to shoppers and tourists. They contend that a hotel, office buildings, an old theater and housing units are not major attractions for people, especially in Southern California.

“It doesn’t sound like it’s well done or thought out. Office structures are not dynamic,” said Dick Rigby, co-director of the Waterfront Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that studies redevelopment in the nation’s harbors. “Execution is important. People in Los Angeles are not unsophisticated. They know clunky stuff when they see it.”

Another redevelopment consultant who requested anonymity summed it up this way: “What do you see when you come into San Pedro? A George Brazil plumbing sign, a chain-link fence and an abandoned gas station. After that, there is nothing to see.”

Entry Doesn’t Lure Visitors

Indeed, the town’s main entrance, the Harbor Freeway to Gaffey Street, is hardly an attractive portal, coursing through an industrial landscape of refineries, tank farms and towering hammerhead cranes used to unload ships. In San Pedro, the heart of the redevelopment area is bracketed by halfway houses and nine blocks of low-income housing.

“For 90% of the people who live around here, the commercial and retail possibilities are bad news. They go somewhere else,” said Vernon E. Hall, the former chief engineer for the Harbor Department, who oversaw the port’s recreational and retail projects.

Longtime community activists say the most potentially attractive part of San Pedro was razed by the redevelopment agency years ago to make way for modern structures. Beacon Street’s turn-of-the-century buildings, they contend, should have been restored and turned into a historical district filled with stores and restaurants.

“The critics are absolutely correct. We have not realized the predictions,” said John Hemer, a former agency manager for the harbor area. “What has been done is rather modest.”

Nevertheless, Hemer defended the effort, saying redevelopment has cleaned up the area and perhaps set the stage for more successful projects.

Some community leaders in San Pedro say that is unlikely without strong leadership and a master plan. Generally, the port and the redevelopment agency have taken separate planning paths for their respective projects.

The only effort to draft a comprehensive blueprint crumbled two years ago after it was initiated by the Crail-Johnson Foundation, a charitable organization run by the Johnson family, whose patriarch, Robert Johnson, made a fortune in oil and real estate.

In late 1997, the foundation launched a nonprofit planning council of residents, builders, redevelopment experts and port and city officials. Harrison Price Co., a leading attractions consultant, set up brainstorming sessions, but they were never held.

Although businesspeople, community leaders and harbor officials said they liked the concept, the effort was dead by June 1998.

“After giving wholehearted support for this, word came down from the councilman’s office not to deal with us,” said Alan Johnson, who spearheaded the drive for the master plan.

Sources, who requested anonymity, said Svorinich worked behind the scenes to sink the effort because he was forming his own council committee on waterfront development. They also said that Svorinich found out that John Barbieri, one of his former aides, was a paid advisor to the Johnsons.

In 1994, Barbieri complained to the district attorney’s office about possible financial irregularities involving the councilman’s election campaign. An investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Glickman said the councilman turned against the Crail-Johnson group because he “didn’t like the consultant involved, it was premature, and we wanted the [redevelopment agency] and the port to do” the planning.

But residents say the relationships among the Harbor Department, the redevelopment agency and local citizens have been strained for years--a rift now helping fuel a local effort to secede from Los Angeles and take control of the harbor.

Local citizens say port officials have repeatedly shut them out of important decisions affecting recreational and retail development on harbor property. They repeatedly complain about the department’s emphasis on building more cargo terminals and its lack of attention to projects that could help economic revitalization in town.

Local Involvement in Planning Sought

Community involvement is necessary, they say, because the port owns the waterfront parcels that are potentially the most attractive for visitors and tourists. What happens there can affect what happens in the central business district.

“We need public participation and public hearings for the ideas that are presented,” said Frank O’Brien, a community activist. “Instead, its an internal process, without local input. You just get three minutes at the podium during the public comment part of Harbor Commission meetings.”

Larry A. Keller, the port’s executive director, says the Harbor Department’s main priority has been developing Los Angeles into one of the most successful cargo hubs in the world. But that doesn’t mean the port is a bad neighbor, he said.

Keller cites a number of port contributions to the community, including millions of dollars in improvements to Cabrillo Beach, a proposed trolley line on port land, the annual Lobster Festival and a port beautification program.

“If we were an automobile plant,” he said, “we would look like a good corporate citizen.”

Harbor officials say they will not relinquish any port revenue or control of port land to the redevelopment agency, which has been plagued by serious financial and management problems as well as a lack of success in San Pedro and elsewhere.

“We don’t want [the redevelopment agency] doing it, not at all,” Keller said. “There would be no benefit to the port. We are focused. We know what our game plan is. We are using port funds, and we can do it faster than they can.”

Last year, however, the port entered into an agreement with the agency to open lines of communication during the creation of a new redevelopment area along Pacific Avenue, one of San Pedro’s main commercial streets. Port officials promised to inform the agency about their redevelopment plans and to seek local input.

“The port will work with [the redevelopment agency],” said Assistant City Atty. Richard M. Helgeson, one of the port’s lawyers. “We have never done this before. The [agency] and the port are interested in a relationship that is beneficial to both.”

Harbor officials are restarting their search for builders who want to develop the cruise terminal, Ports o’ Call and the Unocal tank farm. Last year, the port postponed action on the three projects because so few developers were interested. They are confident the port will get a good response this time because Ports o’ Call is no longer tied up in court.

“Are people impatient? Yes,” Keller said. “Are we moving on things? Yes. It just takes time.”