Small Town, and Proud of It

San Pedro is a small place surrounded by very big things--the hills of Palos Verdes, the Los Angeles Harbor, the Vincent Thomas Bridge, the Pacific Ocean. And that may account for its reputation. For clannishness. For extraordinary civic pride.

Technically the southern tip of Los Angeles, San Pedro has steadily refused to consider itself part of anything. At best, San Pedro views the rest of the city with cordial disinterest; at worst, it wants out--talk of secession, which began days after the annexation papers were signed in 1909, has reached the petition-submitting stage. The election and inauguration of San Pedro resident Jim Hahn as L.A. mayor has quieted the grumblings for the moment, but no one expects a new feeling of Angeleno solidarity to emerge during his stewardship.

Two arteries of the big city--Western Avenue and the Harbor Freeway--end, or begin, in San Pedro, and that probably makes perfect sense to most of its 76,000 residents. The rest of the city is just so much roadside scenery; nice enough, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

“Where else can you find these views, the beach, nice people and parking?” asks Jennifer Falk. “I’ve never lived anywhere else, and I never will.”

“You go to the market, you know the store owner, and the clerks and everyone else in the market, “ says Darlene Huntington. “OK, so the beach is not the greatest, but it’s our beach. We all grew up here, our parents grew up here. It’s like a family.”

“And it’s really a melting pot,” says Annette McDonald. “There is no ‘racial’ here because everyone went to high school together.”

The three women are on their daily walk along the palisades in Point Fermin Park, pushing Huntington’s 18-month-old daughter, Ava, through a sun-dappled morning, chatting with each other and people they pass.

“My husband is from Pebble Beach,” says Huntington. “He wanted me to move up there. I said no way.” She compromised and now lives in Palos Verdes. “But I still come to Pedro every day to do everything.”

In transient Los Angeles, where many track their ascent in the social order by changing ZIP codes, the loyalty San Pedrans feel is at once inspiring and baffling. This is, after all, a working port--for every lovely vista there is a billowing smokestack, a regiment of cranes--with a rough-edged history, which includes a chronic gang problem, and a recent economic downturn.

Though import-export businesses thrive, the fishing industry does not: Where once there were 300 commercial fishing operations, there are now 22. And Ports O’ Call, for years the local tourist attraction, is undergoing a last-chance renovation.

But when asked what Hahn, the first L.A. mayor from San Pedro, should do for his town of residence, the three women pause, searching for a possible improvement.

“Stop so many condos from being built,” McDonald says.

“Get us a dog park,” Huntington says. “That’s all we need. A dog park.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Johnny Anderson, a tattoo artist from Torrance who has worked in San Pedro for almost five years. “For an area that has so many impoverished sections to have so much pride, it’s just amazing.”

Like the Southern gentry of Charleston and Savannah, like the Daughters of the American Revolution doyennes of Boston and New York, the citizens of San Pedro have a fierce sense of lineage. Ask a passerby if he or she lives in San Pedro, and the answer invariably is “bornandbred.” One word. Or they will explain that they were bornandbred, then left for a few years, but now they’re back.

“Everyone comes back,” says Estrella Esquivel, social recreation director for the San Pedro Boys & Girls Club. “It doesn’t matter how long you’re gone or where you go, you always come back.”

By these lights, the new mayor isn’t really from San Pedro. He did not grow up here; he did not go to one of the two high schools here (San Pedro High and Mary Star of the Sea); the house he lives in belonged to his wife’s parents, not his, and so, though he is a resident, he is not a Pedro boy.

“You can always tell a Pedro boy or girl,” says Esquivel, as she stands in an eddy of children, some of the 500 who the club will serve this summer. “At least I can. Even if you don’t know them, and you do know most of them, you know. It’s an attitude. A way of walking or something. People who aren’t from here look like they don’t belong. They just look it.”

Still, San Pedro undoubtedly helped Hahn win the election, and as a tough-on-crime Democrat, the new mayor fits in with the town’s political leanings. A popular poster listing characteristics that make a person a real San Pedran includes: “A real San Pedran votes Democrat but thinks Republican.”

Croatian, Portuguese and Italian fishing families, many of them Catholic, founded San Pedro. Content with the beauty of the hills rising from the harbor, they built their homes, their church, their businesses and dutifully produced large families to do the same. More than 100 years later, some of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in those family homes, work still on the docks or in town and worship still at Mary Star of the Sea. The town’s population has remained steady for the last two decades, and there is a sense of continuity that is palpable in this town, an intimacy--among the people, and between the people and the place.

They see the same things their grandparents did--the gulls that hang like kites over the ocean; the Angel’s Gate Lighthouse that marks the entrance to the port; cargo ships on which railroad-car-size containers are stacked like Legos; the signs at the edge of town announcing the presence of Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and the time and place of meetings.

Other things have changed. Over the years, the hills of Palos Verdes have been terraced with the red-tiled roofs of multimillion-dollar homes; an ornate pagoda housing the Korean Friendship Bell now stands in improbable silhouette against the southern end of town; cruise ships join the tankers in the harbor, impossibly white, impossibly tall; and hotels such as the Sheraton and Hilton stand nearby the sparkling marina.

The people too have changed. There has always been a small core of blacks and Asians in San Pedro, but in the past 10 years, the Latino population has grown to 40%, almost equaling the 47% white population.

Entering San Pedro from the Harbor Freeway on Gaffey Street, the community’s main drag, one anticipates, for a few moments, a beach town. The light is right--that white-edged yellowy glare that is two-thirds sun, one-third reflection from the sea. But although there are the requisite number of bait shops, there are none of the Boogie board and taffy emporiums that mark a seaside resort.

There is a beach here, Cabrillo Beach, but it is small and scruffy, not a vacation destination. For all its dazzling sun and breezy clime, San Pedro remains a working town--the sidewalks are all but deserted during office hours--mostly because its sea remains a working sea; it is there to provide food and the transportation of goods, not for hordes of languid bathers to paddle in.

“We’re cliffy, not beachy,” says Lisa Jimenez, a bornandbred who worked for years as a nurse at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, “and that makes a difference.” “This is much more a true residential town,” says her husband, Julian, a park maintenance supervisor for the Department of Recreation and Parks. “It’s not transient; it’s not about tourism; it’s not about summer parties.”

As part of Julian’s job, the Jimenezes live in the Point Fermin Lighthouse, one of two local landmarks in the park. This one is an 1874 white clapboard vision of Victoriana, surrounded by green lawn, roses and flower beds. The other landmark, several hundred yards and a world away is Walker’s Cafe, a tiny eating and drinking establishment known for its biker clientele and appearance in the movie “Chinatown.” (Director Robert Towne is a famous San Pedro bornandbred.)

It was founded by Bessie and Ray Walker who, according to the biography on the back of small, Xeroxed menus, bought the place in the early 1940s when it was “such a dive that the roaches walked off with the food, utensils and maybe some customers.”

The original menu is painted on the wall, and every other inch of wall space is occupied--by pictures of celebrities, by souvenir plaques questioning the disposition and sobriety of the chef, and other tchotchkes.

Walker’s does most of its business on the weekends, says waitress Rhonda Peterson between orders, but there are a fair amount of regulars who like to just come any time and sit for hours, just watching the sky or on a clear day, Catalina. “There are some that you don’t like to see coming,” she says, with a wry smile, “but most of them are OK, and they take care of each other.”

Peterson has worked at Walker’s for six months, but she’s been coming in for about seven years. She’s Pedro bornandbred, but she says she left for a while. “Came back around nine years ago. Don’t know why,” she says with the same twist of a smile. “Seemed the best place I could think of.”

Although a relative newcomer, Gary Fulmer is as big a Pedro booster as a bornandbred. He arrived in town two years ago, by way of Guam, following his daughter who is enrolled in Mount St. Mary’s. He grew up in Alabama, and spent some time in Miami before joining the Navy, but he prefers San Pedro, where he owns a yacht-maintenance company, to just about anywhere he’s been. “These are good hard-working people,” he says.

“The kids here still say ‘yessir,’ ‘nosir,’ and people have the same values I was raised with. It’s a real place.”

He’s just finished up a latish lunch at Utro’s, a restaurant located a few miles away from Walker’s in Berth 73, just behind the scaffolded Ports O’ Call village. Owned by Cheryl and Joe Utovac, both bornandbreds, Utro’s has been around for more than 20 years, six in its present location.

Cheryl, who had her first job in Ports O’ Call village, says they’re hoping the nearby work will be done soon, although business is pretty steady. “We get everyone in here,” she says. “Fisherman, dock workers, office workers, businessmen.”

Many of them she knows by name, not that she has much time for small talk. A young man comes in with a cardboard box full of meat. “Did your dad get my message?” Cheryl asks. “Yeah, but he couldn’t come so he sent me,” the young man answers disappearing into the kitchen.

On his way out, he asks if she has any burgers ready. “Sorry, they’re all made to order,” she says, “but we’ll make you one now.”

“Nah, I’m on the clock,” he says, heading out the door.

“Call first next time,” she yells after him, “and we’ll have one waiting for you.”

For Shirley Smith, owner of the Pirate’s Cove Magic Shop, that trend was reversed. She and her husband came to San Pedro from outside Victorville in 1993 to help their son in his storage business. They originally opened their magic store in Ports O’ Call, but when business began to suffer there, they moved the shop into town, onto 6th Street.

With its newly refurbished historic Warner’s Theater and boho art gallery/coffeehouse Sacred Grounds, 6th Street is as close to an Old Towne as it gets in San Pedro. No Z Gallery, no Sur La Table, but there’s a farmer’s market at 6th and Mesa every Friday morning, and now on the first Thursday of every month, the street is closed off during the evenings for a local art and street fair.

Smith likes San Pedro, mainly because of the harbor.

“We get a lot of people off the cruise ships,” she says, “and that’s nice, talking to people from all over the country.”

And she could spend hours just watching the big ships gliding by, bigger than most of the buildings in town, bigger it sometimes seems, than the town itself. She and her husband live on their boat, and for the first few months, they were in a slip right near where the big ships turned.

“Every time I’d see a new one, I’d grab my camera,” Smith says. “I sure do miss it, watching those big boats move in and out. Really, it was something.”