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Creative ideas are often born out of struggle, not unlike political movements. Usually though, the struggle is internal––like an artist attempting to capture an image in his mind onto a canvas, or the poet hammering out words from his subconscious. It is a personal challenge to bring form to a blank page. It's mostly done in the privacy and seclusion of the studio, the place where it's safe to confront one's demons––the truth of line, color, and meaning. Not so with the creation of the San Pedro Arts, Culture and Entertainment district planning committee. The process of creating this plan has been more like a sequestered jury, arguing over the innocence of a defendant who can only be understood in the abstract. But the verdict is, that it is an idea whose time has come!
After more than eight months of haggling over the parameters, the minutia of grammar and language and a map, the ACE district plan was published and quickly given the stamp of approval this week. First, the San Pedro Chamber Economic Development subcommittee, which voted 13-0 to adopt, then forward it to the full board, and then that very same night at the Central Neighborhood Council, which endorsed it with a resounding vote of confidence of both stakeholders and board members 34-0. Before we go to press it will be presented and I predict adopted by the CRA Community Advisory Council, it will then go to the CRA commission and then to the LA City Council for approval. It seems to have more inspirational public support than even the ACE jury suspected.
In essence, the plan calls for promoting the current arts district and building upon what we currently have by preserving historic infrastructure and promoting a pedestrian friendly town. This, as well as promoting the retention of artists and art galleries with affordable artist housing options while creating ways to make the core downtown San Pedro area more business friendly for all. This will ultimately create a vibrancy that will sustain the main street retail economy. This couldn't happen at a more propitious time, for the best of reasons.
You see, in many cities attempts to recreate themselves into artist colonies by rebuilding their urban core with upscale condos–– promoting the "loft living." Their only problem is that they don't actually have a creative community and have to import it. They don't have many cultural venues, unique restaurants or waterholes, so they have to build them. Not so here in Pedro-Ville, in fact if you look back carefully at the history of this place you will find some four or five generations of the creative class that has somehow eked out a living alongside of the fishermen, the longshoremen, cannery workers and ship builders. They are still here, descendants of a creative muse. More often is the case, in other places, that real estate speculation creates a stampede for higher rents and the law of supply and demand kills the art scene and you end up with stucco villages with no history, no culture, and no artists. The experiment here is to find a balance or a formula not based strictly on speculation values but cultural ones.
Enter Dick Pawlowski (a.k.a. Richard Royce Venture, XPO group and newsanpedro.com)- for the past many months he has been the gadfly of almost every public meeting touting at first the excavation of Pacific Avenue and now Sixth Street to build a man-made creek as "infrastructure", eliminating traffic and parking on historic retail streets and replacing them with "At the Grove" type of pedestrian mall– faux urbanism. Unfortunately San Pedro Magazine put him on their cover a month ago with this idea and subsequently gave him his own column from which to espouse his lunacy.
Pawloski is no Rick Caruso. He doesn't come with a high-end architectural design team or even a $400 million backer. He persists at every juncture to propound his creek idea as the be-all and end-all concept to attract business to a "Cheese Cake Factory" brand-name-it destination for retail shopping in San Pedro's down town core.
He really doesn't get it. Locals don't want this place to look like Torrance or Redondo Beach. They don't want to lose the historic character of this place, which cannot be replicated like main street at Disneyland, nor would they want it to be. But if it's water Pawlosky wants, as he now pronounces from his singular idea column on development in vacuous pages of SP Mag then let him deal with the premise of the 320 million gallons per day that the Los Angeles County Sanitation district wants to pump through Pedro! As many of you have heard lately, the Sanitation district desires to replace the aging outfall sewer system, which now lies underground along Western Avenue and empties off White Point, with a new $2 billion tunnel under some other yet-to-be-determined part of town.
For all of the disruption this ten -year project will create, 100 truck trips per day and the boring of access shafts in public parks, they might as well be building a subway system, but no this is just a sewer. The problem is that they just don't know what to do with the deluge of secondarily treated toilet water that gets flushed daily. Imagine that! Los Angeles County has a problem of TOO MUCH WATER! Yes it is true but perhaps we could team up Pawloski with the engineers at the Sanitation district and they could come up with a grand idea for a lake or a river. The Dominguez Channel comes to mind as a polluted concourse that could use a good flushing out. Just don't put it in the middle of San Pedro!
