A San Pedro State of Mind

The day we moved into our new home in San Pedro, my grasp of the place we were going to settle down in and raise our daughter was as incomplete as the building that sheltered us. Walls were not painted, we lived on the sub-flooring for weeks until the hardwood was installed; the stucco on the outside of the house followed shortly afterwards, and a new door painted red for good luck. It has taken many months for me to come to terms with the San Pedro I've fallen in love with and the bad reputation it has. The truth, it seems, is as elusive as the thick-skinned San Pedran who has all but written off what others may think and turned a proverbial back on public opinion.

So what about this place? San Pedro is so mysterious and unreadable to outsiders, it's as if it were a mist-laden but forbidding island lost to the world, only seen by a hardy few who venture close to its shores. In more practical terms, this town reveals itself as a multiple personality, and depending on who you are, you may only see one of her many aspects. This has frustrated many San Pedrans over the decades, and I know of no other town quite like this one when it comes to differing opinions about the place. I discovered this when I began telling people we were moving down here. I saw quizzical looks (good), and the kind of polite mask people take on when they don't want to be impolite (not so good). Others were just blunt: "Aren't there gangs there?" someone asked me? "It's rough down there," was another comment. "Dirty." "Polluted" "Industrial". These perceptions surprised me because after the amount of time I'd spent going down to Pedro over the three years it took to hobby-build our home, this was not the San Pedro I knew.

Perhaps the secret of why San Pedro's true character continues to elude outsiders, is its history, and the unfortunate luck of being sandwiched next to hilly, horse-mad enclave and, some would say, an uber-private community of Southern California's wealthiest inhabitants: the 'quiet elite' of Rancho Palos Verdes. Unlike Beverly Hills, its flashy nouveau riche neighbor to the north, RPV is old money, and the well runs deep. Fiercely protective of its prime piece of real-estate, the community is a true cultural child of the once powerful Sepulveda Dynasty who first fed their cattle on the Rancho San Pedro peninsula and then obtained ownership after a court battle with the rightful owner, a luckless army captain who serving afar when his father died. Lush with old oak and fragrant pine, this oasis in the otherwise sprawling metropolis that is Los Angeles, looks down on San Pedro as one would as an owner of a mega-corporation would view its teeming (and oh-so-necessary) laborers. And they take great care to protect this illusory barrier, keeping their distance, despite the availability of good restaurants and interesting activities. The irony of all this is San Pedro might have been the beachfront playground for the Rancho crowd, had not the the various political players of the late 19th and early 20th Century been so sucessful in designating the tideland shallows of San Pedro Bay as the city of Los Angeles' new harbor. The other choice was Santa Monica (there by the Grace of God go you, Montana Blvd.) San Pedro would have developed into a choice piece of waterfront/boardwalk property, home to the rich and famous, replete with spectacular ocean and mountain views.

But, as luck would have it, San Pedro became the port for a growing metropolis, feeding goods, steel, lumber, and eventually oil into a hungry population. The Navy came, building ships for the war, the Merchant Marines were based here, commercial and pleasure boat-building flourished. The biggest refineries may have risen in acres to the northeast in Wilmington, but San Pedro remained true to its sea roots: in the largest fleet in the West Coast, fishermen and women focused on the bounty of the temperate Pacific oceans, spawning a tuna habit that fed the entire nation (StarKist began here, among others). Though much of this is long gone, this is the San Pedro that most people see in their mind's eye when they look to this working harbor town, a place where you got dirt under your fingernails, a place where immigrants from every country where fishing was a staple, came and joined the hustle and bustle of sea-based bounty. A place where longshoremen labored up from the docks in rubber boots and caps of wool, Navy men in their white dickies poured into town where bars were lively, and the women questionable.

But the Port mechanized, and the ships got bigger, the pot of gold rich beyond belief, much of it going north to the city of Los Angles who had annexed San Pedro under protest almost a century before. The fish, and with them the canning industry moved to warmer Mexican waters, and the town had to adapt, or die. By this time, San Pedro was flush with more personal wealth than might have been imagined. Powerful waterfront unions had birthed a new generation of six-figure, blue collar workers who became parents of college-bound children. Houses grew large, even luxurious, and they spread up the hill and eventually bled into the Rancho borders. All the while, the families who had come here generations before, remained fond of the place, perhaps because their families back home in the old countries (Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, Mexico) were the kind who pass their trades from father to son, and to raise children close to other relatives. It should be no surprise that we have the largest number of navy veterans in Los Angeles too, as they return to where they had once been stationed in the many oceanside officer barracks that still pepper our town.

San Pedro's essence is unique in that many cultures have lived here and worked here together for generations in a ten-square mile area. But it can also be a source of community profiling. One of the personalities that visitors often see first is the visible Latino population (about 40% overall). What they may not know is that nexus of this population has co-existed with its Anglo neighbors for generations. These are families that have grown up together, married, and raised children who also grew up and married Pedro spouses. We have a strong Eastern European and Mediterranean tradition here, but it is less obvious than the Latin temperament: guns shooting to the sky on the Fourth of July, passionate affairs and clashes of the heart, and yes, gang members who tattoo Rancho San Pedro on their necks from the projects on First Street. But this is not gang-held territory, and perhaps the main reason this hasn't happened is because San Pedro remains a stable population in ethnic mix and inter-dependence fueled by Pedran loyalty. That loyalty is as much about the ocean as it is family. To them, the sea is life-affirming, a source of food, sustenance, and an ancient link to hearth and home. Ask any of the third and fourth generation Pedrans why they stay, and their answer will be the same: it's in their blood, and they never stray far.

San Pedro is also a shy girl. She chooses to hide her best features from the visiting public and you have to really spend time here to discover them. The slightly tattered coat of a gritty downtown, all but forgotten by the rush of economic change, is all that most passers by see, a feature of San Pedro's end-of-the-earth nook accessible only by a freeway that dead-ends into the rough and tumble, or the lesser-known long and winding coastal road through the most secretive part of a secret Rancho, territory guarded by landslides, shifting earth, and a destination to the kinder, gentler part of town. Newcomers invariably land into our struggling downtown, only recently shrugging off decades of neglect with shiny condo towers and restored Victorian lofts; This entryway is what gives San Pedro the bad name it can't seem to shake. What they don't see is the larger, hidden part of Pedro, the community of artists who live and work here, the many-featured neighborhoods of brightly colored stucco homes, patchwork gardens, backyard roosters and wild peacocks, orchid blooms, orange trees, cliffside neighborhoods with million-dollar views. Lighthouses, aquariums, secluded beaches, parks with bonfires for scary stories, 4-yelper, family-owned cafes with history on the walls, small town sensibilities in a vast urban landscape. Another surprise around the corner.

Yes, San Pedro can also be a sulky child, a fuck-you and the horse you rode in on kind of town too, but as a young woman I cut my cultural teeth on the gritty downtown neighborhoods of Toronto, dreaming one day of my own sklight-lit loft among the abandoned garmet factories that were quickly being converted for artists like me. I get that San Pedro is quirky, and feisty, even though I have to call 311 every week to remove a slash of graffiti I see someplace in town, or pick up bits of garbage and the flotsam that the steady wind coming off the hill blows against fences and collects everywhere. Pain in my ass. But kids play in the street here, oblivious to the suburban man's burden of fear, they skateboard, and ride their bikes to the little corner markets tucked into neighborhood streets just like my husband did when he was ten. My eye for value is still good: our street ends in a new park overlooking the marina, and when I drive my daughter to school, the view down steep Anchovy Ave. is 180 degree ocean with Catalina laid on the horizon like a magnificent rocky stole. It feels like you are diving head first into a world of water. Mimi paints and prances in her school productions, and tends to a wild native garden outside her classroom. There is order in the magnificent chaos, a perfect metaphor for the life she is experiencing here.

So, for a newcomer like me, it is difficult to try to explain all that San Pedro is because I haven't yet developed the thick skin of my more tempered neighbors. I take the insults personally, still not yet willing to pray the mantra I hear so often from the old-timers- all said with a certain gleam in their eye: "San Pedro is our secret". This secret may begin with a defining moment: mine was the first time we drove to our new house at night. We curved south down Harbor Boulevard alongside the hulking shapes of gleaming white cruise ships, past the aging Ports of Call, still gamely coy in her coat of many colors, and then all the noise, shapes, and light fell away as we reached what seemed to be the end of the earth. And in a way, it was. The night sky, reaching away from the end of the peninsula, darkened from the amber hue of a bustling port to a deep velvet blue-black, starry filled and endless. No matter how many times I come home along the water, the magic of that moment never loses its impact.

I don't know all that makes San Pedro tick yet, but I think I'll have to let go of the one word comeback I can't seem to find at the appropriate moment for the doubters and the jaded, who believe we should hide our pain and our poverty, our struggles, and differences, and segregate them from the triumphs and comforts we acquire as a shield from all that we are. This is real life, all wrapped up in one unique package.

In short, this is one amazing town, man. Deal with it.