By Emma Rault, Columnist
In the past year alone, we’ve seen more than half a dozen iconic San Pedro gathering spots shuttered, razed, or threatened.
It’s an alarming trend that has many locals feeling worried.
After all, these are some of the oldest establishments in town, places that have stood the test of time, that are woven into San Pedro’s sense of history and identity.
Dancing Waters (est. 1940) was demolished last month to make way for apartments with no community or retail space. Further down Pacific Avenue, The Spot (est. 1953) is also slated for demolition to make way for an apartment building.
Down by the waterfront, Utro’s Cafe (est. 1954) closed at the end of 2023. The building will be refurbished as part of the West Harbor project, which would have quintupled their rent.
In downtown, Sacred Grounds (est. 1992) is closing in June 2024 for the renovations of the Warner Grand Theatre, after which the space is set to be repurposed, while the Green Onion (est. 1983) will be losing its location to a new high-rise developed by Holland Partner Group.
Over at Point Fermin, Walker’s Cafe (est. 1946) shuttered in October 2021 and is facing an uncertain future, with the Burbank-based investment group that bought the site planning to develop large-scale housing in the back that, unless changed significantly, would prevent the restaurant from being able to reopen successfully. Meanwhile, the fate of The Corner Store (est. 1947) is also up in the air with the owner’s decision to put it on the market.
Longtime fixtures like this are also called “legacy businesses.” They are what sociologists call “third places”: places separate from home and work — coffee shops, bars, event venues — that bring together people from all walks of life. Research shows that having access to these places fosters a sense of belonging and improves people’s quality of life.
It’s not too late to save our legacy businesses, insists Don Spivack, an LA-based planning consultant and adjunct professor at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy with more than 40 years of experience in local government. “We can do this if there’s enough of a push.”
But the community and local government will have to step up.
That’s because this isn’t just about the economy, the pandemic, or the natural churn of businesses opening and closing over the years. The LA real estate market has become a pressure cooker — and in neighborhoods going through a period of transition, Spivack explains, legacy businesses are at particular risk.
In Little Tokyo and Chinatown, that shift came with new public transit lines, which sparked developer interest.
“In the case of San Pedro, it’s the redevelopment of the [waterfront].”
Of course, these kinds of projects can — and do — bring real benefits to a community. But as urbanist scholar Leslie Kern explained to Random Lengths last month, they can also attract a different, predatory type of development in their wake. What this looks like is an influx of corporations from outside the community, funded by nebulous consortiums of investors from all over the world, trying to maximize the value of land by building fast and big and then cashing out.
For legacy businesses, Spivack says, it’s often a death knell.
Some existing property owners will let buildings decay, knowing they can easily cash out to a developer interested in the land — a process known as “demolition by neglect.” In other cases, generational turnover — an older owner-operator ready to retire without a successor lined up — can put a community favorite at risk of being bought and bulldozed. Or, for renters, being displaced can put them out of business because there’s nowhere affordable left.
Case #1: Dancing Waters
Dancing Waters is a case in point. In 2005, its longtime owner-operator sold the club, at that point operating as La Zona Rosa, to a couple based in Fullerton for $1.1 million. These new owners continued leasing it to La Zona Rosa until around 2014.
About two years later, Todd Congelliere went to look at it as a potential location for what ultimately became The Sardine over on 1101 S Pacific Ave. But the building, he told Random Lengths, was in significant disrepair by then. “I think they wanted $1.2 million, and it was … pretty messed up. It just wasn’t viable for us.”
Jerry Cesario, the senior pastor at Calvary Chapel San Pedro, visited the venue around 2018 or 2019 to possibly rent it for the church. The broker told him the previous tenants had been using it as a cannabis grow site. The out-of-town owners were unaware until they were hit with a steep power bill and visited the property to figure out what was going on.
“When we went to take a look at it, it was in such bad shape inside, with almost every square foot [having been] used for lighting, soil, water [that] it was completely unusable for us,” Cesario told Random Lengths. He remembers there was still marijuana “piled up in certain areas.”
Increasingly rundown, the building continued to sit vacant until the owners sold it to Root Real Estate for $2 million in March 2020 — the entity that has since leveled it to build apartments.
What we are seeing here is the combined effect of generational shift (a longtime owner-operator stepping back), absentee property owners from outside the community, and demolition by neglect: despite letting the building fall into disrepair, the owners were still able to sell to developers at a profit.
Case #2: Walker’s Cafe
There are some similarities with Walker’s Cafe, where the out-of-town descendants of the cafe’s founder sold to a corporation that is now pursuing large-scale housing in the back. 
Unlike Dancing Waters, Walker’s Cafe is structurally sound, as the developer’s architect, Kurt Gibbs, confirmed at a neighborhood council meeting in October 2023: “We found that it really wouldn’t take anything too drastic to put her back the way that she was in her past glory.”
And yet the developers are prioritizing a large residential structure that many have said will mothball the cafe, robbing it of the space it needs to function. So far, the community’s concerns have gone unheard.
Choices like this put the community at risk. An illegal cannabis operation is a safety hazard. (Just two months ago, a man was killed in a fire in a grow house in South LA.) When the unhoused take up residence in a dilapidated building, this can put them in danger.
And Point Fermin Park has seen a notable uptick in tagging and other crimes since Walker’s Cafe closed — a reminder that community spots aren’t just an asset to our lives: they also provide important social control that enhances overall public safety, something urbanist Jane Jacobs stressed in her groundbreaking 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The rapid loss of San Pedro’s community spaces is especially concerning in a time when the U.S. Surgeon General speaks of a nationwide “epidemic of loneliness” and when proposed national legislation to combat loneliness calls for investment in exactly this type of “social infrastructure.”
It also seems like a step backward when neighborhoods all over the U.S. are working on “de-suburbanizing” in response to a growing understanding that having places to hang out within walking distance makes for safer and happier communities.
It makes economic sense too, says Rudy Espinoza, executive director of Inclusive Action for the City, an LA-based nonprofit that aims to bolster small business development. “Consumers want to go to a neighborhood that’s different and creative and has a certain identity. Small businesses that have been in a community for a long time are the bearers of that culture. If you strip that … it’s just not sustainable.”
So how can we save our historic gathering spots before it’s too late?
Grassroots activism can go a long way. In the past, community-led landmarking campaigns saved Point Fermin Lighthouse and the former Point Fermin Library building on Shepard Street (colloquially known as the Wigwam), both beloved neighborhood hubs.
But a widespread problem calls for more than just putting out individual fires — we need to create a support system allowing legacy establishments to thrive.
To achieve this, Spivack says, communities and the city government will need to work together closely.
“As a matter of principle, the government does have a role to play in helping to direct the market,” Spivack says.
He argues that this is best tackled from the bottom up at the local level: “The community advocating to the council office, the council office getting the [relevant city] departments to move.”
A lot of it comes down to giving owners incentives to do the right thing. Several decades ago, that’s basically how the CRA helped to save the iconic Bradbury Building in Downtown LA.
The owners were considering “tear[ing] it down [to] build a bigger building on the site,” he explains. So the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) — where Spivack worked for more than 20 years — rolled out a so-called “air rights transfer” program.
Instead of tearing the building down and replacing it with something taller, the owners were able to sell the square footage they would have gained by doing that to a different developer, who could tack it onto another project elsewhere.
This takes some planning Tetris, but the program was used successfully to save about two dozen historic buildings throughout Downtown LA. It could be reactivated in other places — like San Pedro.
And that’s just one example. Another possibility is a vacancy tax on commercial real estate, which already exists in cities like Oakland and Washington, D.C. This would combat deliberate neglect from landlords waiting to sell the land at an opportune time or demanding rents well above market value.
Struggling businesses and property owners have access to various grant schemes in place at the state and national levels. These could be buttressed by the revival of local initiatives like the rehab loan program formerly administered by the CRA.
Local governments can also help aging business owners with succession planning by encouraging them to talk to a community organization or neighborhood council to find a new operator.
“And [the local government] may be able to come up with financing plans to help the transition,” Spivack says.
In an encouraging sign, this fall, the City of LA is opening applications for its brand-new Legacy Business Program, which offers grants of up to $20,000 and practical support for small businesses that have been operational for 20 years or more. Applications from businesses threatened by displacement will be prioritized.
Numerous cities have rolled out these programs to protect their neighborhood mom-and-pops since San Francisco became the first in 2015.
As San Pedro finds itself at a crossroads, it’s worth remembering the element of choice. Developers have a choice. Not every square foot has to be a mansion or a market-rate high rise. We can get more housing without displacing people or throttling legacy businesses.
“Demolition by neglect” is also a choice. In other parts of the world, they routinely restore centuries-old buildings. Here, the phrase “beyond repair” is often cynically trotted out by bad-faith agents eager to cheer on a much-loved watering hole’s demise.
The City of LA can choose whether and when to step in.
And the community has a choice, too. It’s not a choice between blight or condos — we don’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils. It’s choosing what change to push for, and how hard to fight for the places that matter.
It’s widely acknowledged that the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods like old Beacon Street was a mistake. The destruction of individual landmarks like Dancing Waters, with the dust barely settled, already looks the same.
Legacy businesses are the cultural and economic backbone of our community. They are too special — and in the current planning landscape, their fate too fragile — to leave up to chance. The time to care is now.