L.A. Fleet Week has landed.
Sailors and Marines in their dress uniforms will flood into San Pedro’s downtown and waterfront areas following the arrival of the USS Essex late Tuesday, May 19. Restaurants, shops and bars will see the annual surge in business during the 10th annual sea services celebration, which will be in full swing from Friday to Monday, May 22-25.
It’s an event that in many ways has been intertwined with some big changes in the tucked-away seaside enclave that has long carried a reputation as an almost quaint, unlikely fishing village existing on the southern, isolated tip of the vast city of Los Angeles.
But that’s been changing.
A rush of new development has started to revamp the area, home to the massive Port of Los Angeles, now the busiest cargo port in the Western Hemisphere.
Mid-rise residential/commercial buildings have popped up along the waterfront and in other commercial areas over the past couple of decades. A new waterfront, West Harbor, is set to roll out with openings this summer, with a World Cup viewing party also set to take place there in late July. And beyond that, the 2028 Summer Olympics will bring sailing events off San Pedro’s Outer Harbor.
Former Los Angeles Councilmember Joe Buscaino, who represented the 15th District from January 2012 to December 2022, often drove developers to town in his own car to tout San Pedro’s potential during his term of office. And it often worked — as the town, over the years, soon began to see movement.
Alex Valente, principal at Trammell Crow, calls it a “San Pedro renaissance” that’s probably been 30 or 40 years in the making.
He’s part of the team that’s built Vivo on Harbor, 511 S. Harbor Blvd., and the planned 281-unit, eight-story Jules San Pedro, 625 S. Beacon St., that’s set to be finished in 2028 before the Olympics arrive that summer.
San Pedro is “a bit of a developer’s paradise in terms of textbook economic development,” Valente said.
Evergreen attractions, such as the university-based AltaSea ocean research center and the Port of L.A., creates “a presence that makes (developers) feel good about investing” in the area, he said.
The town, said Los Angeles Councilmember Tim McOsker, has changed considerably since his grandparents’ day — and is still evolving.
“What we’ve seen over the past 10 years is that San Pedro continues to grow and evolve, even as we hold on to so many institutions and traditions that make this place both unique and familiar,” he said in a written statement. “We’ve invested substantially in the waterfront, making it welcoming and accessible to locals and visitors alike. This is true throughout the year, but especially notable during Fleet Week, when we welcome tens of thousands to the Harbor Area.
“The growth and improvement of the Fleet Week experience over the past several years,” MCosker said, “shows how far we have come, and how far we can go, as a world-class visitors attraction.”
While no one would argue the town is problem-free — San Pedro has battled issues such as crime and homelessness for a number of years, and its long-ago Beacon Street images still linger — its reputation has also evolved.
Before L.A. Fleet Week was born in 2016, the town was host to a smaller event known as Navy Days, a precursor to the current massive event.
It was during Navy Days in 2011 when the Naval Criminal Investigative Service — the civilian federal law enforcement agency responsible for investigating felony crime — issued “the map,” cautioning visiting sailors to stay clear of San Pedro’s “redlined” zones. Those zones, according to a flyer with a map and other information on it, were reputed to be “high-drug and distribution” areas and comprised much of the downtown shopping and restaurant district.
The sting hasn’t completely vanished.
“San Pedro has come a long way since that horrible ‘warning’ memo came out,” said San Pedro’s Omelette and Waffle Shop owner Mona Sutton, recalling that the material also included suggestions in Long Beach that sailors could visit. “But I’ll never forget it. It took a long time to choke that down.”
The map included, she said, scenic areas such as Point Fermin and San Pedro’s picturesque southern coastline, along with parts of Gaffey Street, the downtown and the waterfront.
Buscaino, who was the area’s senior lead officer from 2008 to 2010, said San Pedro had experienced an uptick in crime in and around the public housing development that is next to the downtown. NCIS, he said, will do crime mapping based on statistics.
“At the time (in the years before the 2011 Navy Days), we saw a spike in violent crime in the Rancho San Pedro housing development,” said Buscaino, now managing partner for Ballard Partners for government affairs.
But the map, he recalled, “was a gut-punch to us at a time when my predecessor, Janice Hahn, was uplifting the downtown San Pedro area and the chamber was doing all it could do to bring people there. But that’s all in the rearview mirror today.”
Much credit belongs to clearing the encampments on Beacon Street and building more housing at all income levels, Buscaino said — efforts he pursued during his term on the council.
James Brown, owner of San Pedro Brewing Co. and Port Town Brewery, recalled vividly the huge stir — and sting — the map controversy caused.
“We were all taken aback by that — the ‘red zone’ — and a number were insulted by it. It was pretty off-putting,” he said, recalling that he added a “Red Zone Ale” to the Brewing Co.’s large selection on the menu. The Red Zone Ale has long since been retired, he said.
A July 2011 Daily Breeze article noted that the cautionary map was provided to crew members on the first ship to arrive for what was then Navy Week in the Port of Los Angeles. Word spread quickly throughout the tight-knit town and it fast became the topic of a much-wider discussion, turning up in stories on national blogs, out-of-town newspapers, television stations — and, of course, on Facebook.
The reaction among locals, Brown said, was: “This isn’t who we are. But it helped us to put a better face forward.”
And now, with a longer view, he said, San Pedro seems to be triumphing over that early spate of bad publicity.
“When (Fleet Week) started, when it was just Navy Days, it was pretty tiny,” Brown said. “As it morphed into Fleet Week, it brought so many people from out of town and it’s been a big boon.
“It’s great to be sitting in the restaurant and see sailors there; it makes you proud to be American and proud for our community,” he said.
The town, he added, survived the map controversy and the town — now with a new waterfront development and a more polished image — “kept growing, year after year.”
Fleet Week now brings tens of thousands of visitors to the waterfront for a popular rollout of Navy and Coast Guard ship tours, displays, demonstrations and nonstop entertainment next to the Battleship Iowa, 250 S. Harbor Blvd.
Sailors flood the downtown area, where they are treated to special menu fare, and warm welcomes and discounts by restaurant and shop owners.
San Pedro Chamber of Commerce CEO and President Elise Swanson was working for then-U.S. Rep. Janice Hahn — a San Pedro resident who formerly represented the area on the Los Angeles City Council — when the 2011 map incident occurred.
“I think for those of us who are into hospitality and the tourism industry, (the map) was a wake-up call,” Swanson said, though she called it outdated. “Some of the folks involved in producing it had no idea of what San Pedro had evolved into so that was unfortunate. But it’s been a complete turnaround.”
That 2011 Daily Breeze article also noted that some “took the glass-is-half-full approach to it all, saying the incident and surrounding publicity could open up new opportunities as the town moved to better market itself as a tourist destination.”
“It’s overall a positive thing,” Scott Gray, then president of the Seventh Street Merchants Association, said at the time.
But the map’s contention that the downtown was unsafe was, for the most part, roundly disputed by those doing business in San Pedro at the time.
A follow-up article on July 30, 2011, about the incident noted that Hahn invited then-U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus on a walking tour of the map’s “redlined” district to see how safe and attractive the area was.
“I think it’s important that he personally come and visit San Pedro to walk the redlined areas,” Hahn said in a telephone interview at the time. “I’d spoken to an admiral today, telling him for years San Pedro has rolled out the red carpet” for Navy events.
The map, she also argued at the time, included incorrect and false data.
Fifteen years later, much has changed since that incident.
Sailors and guests will “walk the waterfront; they’ll see that it’s clean. And there’s a lot going on here that people didn’t imagine,” said Los Angeles harbor Commissioner Lee Williams, speaking as an individual about L.A. Fleet Week. “It’s not the same ‘surly town’” it was accused of being.
The town, Sutton added, is fast rebounding from those images.
“The fun thing is to see Fleet Week becoming now such a huge attraction, especially in the last three or four years,” she said. “The event is amazing. The draw for it is unbelievable.”