San Pedro, Los Angeles

Why you should experience San Pedro in Los Angeles, California.

San Pedro is a maritime enclave where the Los Angeles Harbor region's coastal character meets a nineteenth-century port town, generations of waterfront industry and residential hills rising above one of the Pacific Coast's great working harbors.

Positioned between Harbor City, Wilmington, and Rancho Palos Verdes, the neighborhood occupies the southern terminus of Los Angeles, where an elevated peninsula descends through successive residential terraces toward downtown streets, working waterfronts and the protected waters of San Pedro Bay. Victorian houses, Craftsman bungalows, interwar apartment buildings and compact commercial blocks climb from the harbor across a street grid first laid out during the nineteenth century, with abrupt grades repeatedly opening long views toward cranes, channels and the Pacific. Gaffey Street supplies the primary encounter as a north-south spine linking inland commercial blocks with increasingly maritime terrain toward the peninsula's southern end. Harbor Boulevard creates a secondary passage beside the waterfront, where the scale of downtown buildings gives way to piers, maritime structures and the industrial dimensions of the port beyond. The result is a neighborhood whose physical form remains inseparable from the harbor that converted an independent coastal town into Los Angeles's principal maritime gateway.

What you should know about San Pedro.

San Pedro is best known for developing from a small harbor settlement into the community adjoining the Port of Los Angeles, a transformation driven by nineteenth-century trade, rail connections and the political struggle over where Los Angeles would build its deepwater harbor. Spanish missionaries used San Pedro Harbor as a trading point for Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, and the American vessel Lelia Byrd called there in 1805 during an era when Spain still restricted foreign commerce. Mexican independence removed those trade restrictions in 1822, expanding commercial activity around a harbor whose importance increased dramatically after California entered the United States. Phineas Banning accelerated the connection between coast and interior through freight enterprises and the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, completed in 1869 as Southern California's first railroad. Harbor commerce climbed from 50,000 tons in 1871 to 500,000 tons in 1885 as lumber, coal and other cargo moved through San Pedro Bay. The surrounding land boom produced San Pedro's incorporation in 1888, with the young town occupying 650 acres and retaining much of the street, block and alley pattern laid out in 1882. Senator Stephen M. White subsequently became a central figure in the Free Harbor Fight, which pitted San Pedro against competing proposals for a major port farther north along the coast. A federal engineering board selected San Pedro Bay in 1897, and construction of the immense breakwater began two years later. Los Angeles created its Board of Harbor Commissioners in 1907, then annexed San Pedro and Wilmington in 1909 as the harbor entered a period of major dredging, channel enlargement and terminal construction. By 1912 the main channel had been widened and substantial portions of the federal breakwater completed, positioning the harbor for the commercial expansion unleashed by the Panama Canal's 1914 opening.

Commercial fishing created a second historical current as fishermen, cannery workers and maritime laborers arrived from Italy, Croatia and other parts of the Dalmatian coast, Portugal, Scandinavia, Greece and Japan during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Fish Harbor became an industrial center as California Fish Company developed a method for canning cooked tuna in 1903 and Japanese fishermen brought expertise rooted in Wakayama Prefecture to the local fleet. Hook-and-line fishing and live-bait chumming expanded the commercial tuna catch during the 1910s, linking immigrant fishing knowledge directly to an industry that eventually supplied American households on a vast scale. Terminal Island developed a Japanese American community approaching 3,000 residents, with Tuna Street supporting stores, restaurants, religious institutions and other gathering places beside the canneries. World War II shattered that community when its Japanese American residents became the first in the nation forcibly removed en masse from their homes before wartime incarceration. Shipbuilding simultaneously expanded across the harbor: Southwestern Shipbuilding began its Terminal Island yard in 1918, launched the West Carnifax six months later and returned to major naval production during World War II, when the yard produced Fletcher-class destroyers. Tuna production reached another high point after the war, with Terminal Island canneries supplying 80 percent of the twelve million cases produced annually in the United States during the 1950s. San Pedro's Italian and Croatian communities remained deeply connected with fishing and maritime labor, carrying the demographic consequences of the harbor economy into churches, social institutions and neighborhood life long after industrial consolidation changed the waterfront itself.

How to fold San Pedro into your trip.

San Pedro works as the anchor for an outing connecting an 1874 lighthouse created for expanding Pacific shipping, a grand Korean gift overlooking the ocean and a marine institution whose architectural history reaches from a beach collection to Frank Gehry.

Begin at Point Fermin Lighthouse, completed in 1874 after shipping entrepreneur Phineas Banning had pressed for a navigational light near San Pedro Harbor as early as 1854. Lighthouse Board draftsman Paul J. Pelz designed the two-story residence and central tower in the Victorian Stick Style, using horizontal wood siding, cross-braced balconies, exposed structural ornament and a gingerbread-detailed cross-gabled roof. The federal government had acquired the 3.4-acre site in 1873, and the light entered service as maritime traffic along the California coast continued expanding after the Gold Rush; subsequent Navy, Army and Coast Guard uses connected the property with the military history of the harbor peninsula. Continue to Korean Bell of Friendship, presented by the Republic of Korea in 1976 for the United States Bicentennial, in honor of Korean War veterans and as a symbol of friendship between the two countries. Modeled after the Divine Bell of King Seongdeok cast in 771, the bronze bell weighs 17 tons, rises twelve feet and measures seven and a half feet across, with relief figures pairing a Goddess of Liberty with Korean spirits carrying the Korean flag, Rose of Sharon, laurel branch and dove of peace. Korean craftsmen constructed its stone-and-wood pavilion above the Pacific, and the completed ensemble was dedicated on October 3, 1976. Conclude at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, whose origins reach to 1935, when marine specimens collected by Los Angeles beach lifeguards moved into the Cabrillo Beach Bathhouse under curator William Lloyd. Lifeguard captain John Olguin became director in 1949 and expanded public education through school programs, beach walks and a 1951 evening program centered on the spawning of grunion along Cabrillo Beach. Frank Gehry and Associates received the commission for a new complex in 1976, and the completed aquarium opened in 1981 with low stucco structures, exposed functional systems and chain-link forms conceived in response to San Pedro's fishing and dockworking environment. Barton Phelps & Associates extended the complex in 2004 with a two-story addition and fiberglass screen, adding another architectural generation to an institution created from the marine life of the surrounding coast. The progression moves from nineteenth-century navigation through a trans-Pacific monument of Korean American friendship and culminates in a marine institution joining scientific education with experimental Los Angeles architecture, tracing three distinct relationships between San Pedro and the Pacific.

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