Permit Woes and City’s Zoning Mistake Helped Slam Shut this Beloved Bar’s Doors
By Emma Rault, Columnist
The Alhambra Cocktail Lounge on 216 W. 11th St. in San Pedro’s historic Vinegar Hill neighborhood has been in business since 1936, making it one of the oldest bars in the state.
The Alhambra is located in the building that — for just three brief years, from 1905 to 1908 — was San Pedro’s first City Hall. There are still stairs leading down to the old jail cell tucked away in the back. It was a neighborhood fixture through World War II, 15 presidents and one global pandemic.
On Tuesday, Jan. 14, the cozy room with its checkerboard floor was filled with people for what may have been the last time.
It was an emotional day. “This has been my second home for 40 years,” said Chuck Jensen.
“My grandma first brought me here,” said Tammie Favazza, now a grandmother of three herself. “I’ve made the most loyal friends here … I’ve been crying all day.”
For the manager, Natasa Suvak Zepsa, it was a painful defeat, after a crime that occurred nearby a year earlier set off a spate of regulatory issues that seemed impossible to fix.
“I’m so tired, I can’t do it anymore,” said Zepsa, 57, a petite blonde woman with red-rimmed glasses who moved to the U.S. nine years ago from Croatia. “I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I’ve got stomach problems. … This is too much. The stress is killing me.”
In December 2023, a shooting occurred on the intersection of 11th and Palos Verdes streets in which a 39-year-old man was killed and two others were injured. Earlier that evening, all three victims had stopped by the Alhambra for a drink before heading to a house party across the street.
The shooting brought the bar to Los Angeles Police Department’s attention. “Whenever a crime is related to a bar, we go in, do an inspection … make sure they’re obeying the law,” LAPD officer Steven Muirhead, head of the Harbor Division’s vice squad, explained to Random Lengths News.
During this inspection, LAPD found that the bar did not have the required permit for live entertainment. The bar had long hosted local bands and occasional karaoke nights. The crowds those events drew accounted for a large share of its revenue, said Zepsa.
Zepsa stepped in a few years ago to keep the bar going on behalf of her husband, who has dementia. As far as she knew, their liquor license allowed live music. She didn’t realize that in addition to the license from Alcoholic Beverage Control — a state entity — the bar also needed a Cafe Entertainment and Shows (CES) permit, which is issued by the Los Angeles Police Commission.
She was confused. She was offended, too, by what she saw as the bar being stigmatized due to the shooting. She says LAPD saw the bar as having a culture of criminality.
Longtime customers are also bewildered by that. “I can’t say the pot-bellied, middle-aged dads that tend to visit the place gave an impression of general criminal intent,” said Jake Hook, a resident of LA’s Westside who visited the Alhambra numerous times. Hook runs an Instagram account called @dinertheory devoted to capturing the iconic LA mom-and-pops that, he says, are disappearing all too quickly.
After LAPD issued a citation for unpermitted live music in March 2024, the issue was kicked up to the City Attorney’s office, which sent a cease-and-desist letter in July. The letter claims that “[b]efore being killed, the [murder victim] had been drinking at the Bar, and he had gone in and out of the Bar at least twice to fire shots into the air.” That’s impossible, Zepsa says: the man was on crutches.
By this point, Zepsa felt overwhelmed by what seemed like a sudden onslaught of accusations. Because it wasn’t just LAPD or the permitting issues. In the fall of 2023, Alcoholic Beverage Control had cited the bar for selling alcohol after hours following an anonymous complaint. There had been some noise complaints to the council office, as well as complaints to LA County’s Public Health Department. It almost seemed like someone had it in for them.
According to the department’s public database, a complaint investigation had revealed roaches. Less than a week later, the issue had been successfully addressed, and yet the following month someone complained again, though a new inspection found no evidence.
For more than 20 years — ever since Zepsa’s husband Mike had taken on the bar in 2001 — the business had run smoothly. Suddenly, things were falling apart. “In the last 14 to 15 months, we had more inspections than in 25 years,” she said.
She felt intimidated by her interactions with the vice squad. The whole business with the music permit was confusing. And in an email attempting to clarify the citation, Officer Muirhead wrote, “We chose an administrative citation rather than a physical arrest.”
Zepsa was shaken. Why was there suddenly talk of getting arrested?
In a conversation with Random Lengths, Officer Muirhead acknowledged that communication between himself and Zepsa had broken down. “After several warnings, we can make an arrest for a misdemeanor, but it’s very unusual,” he said. “That kind of thing is reserved for big parties and things like that, where you can’t get them to stop, so it’s very rare.” He was horrified to learn that this email exchange had rattled Zepsa. “That was not my intention.”
“That bar’s been around for a long time,” he said. “I’m not happy that they closed. That was not my intent or the Police Department’s intent. We’re not trying to take people’s livelihoods away from them.” He said his team had nothing to do with the outreach from the Public Health Department. All they did was forward the case to the City Attorney’s office, as is standard protocol. But the permit violation Officer Muirhead flagged up plunged the bar straight into a bureaucratic nightmare. After the City Attorney’s cease-and-desist letter, Zepsa looked into obtaining the live music permit. “We couldn’t meet the requirements, nor did we have the funds,” she said.
The requirements, as it turns out, are wildly complicated. Zepsa said she was told by a council office staffer to reach out to a Code Engineer at the City of LA’s Department of Building and Safety for clarity. She made that call, as did her friend Sean Forbes, a longtime patron who offered to help. Neither of them ever heard back.
When Random Lengths did some digging, we learned the business was mistakenly rezoned by the city’s Planning Department in the 1980s. As part of an effort to keep coastal overdevelopment in check, entire blocks were “downzoned” to reduce the maximum allowed density of builds. In the process, many longtime mom-and-pops mixed into residential blocks were ignored. They lost their commercial status and were downgraded to residential, putting them in regulatory limbo — even though Planning’s 2017 Community Plan for San Pedro explicitly states the goal of preserving these “small neighborhood-serving amenities.”
This change in zoning wasn’t enforced in the decades since. But now, getting the live music permit would require yet another permit — called a Conditional Use Permit — to resolve the zoning issue. Both that process and applying with the Police Commission for the music permit are so complex that you need to hire a professional to get you through.
It costs $20,000 to apply for a Conditional Use Permit, said longtime restaurant consultant Eddie Navarrette. The professional fees for managing the two application processes run around $15,000 and $10,000, respectively.
That’s at least $45,000 for a business to keep doing what it’s been doing for almost 90 years. The Alhambra is a single room that measures about 1,000 square feet. The space has 26 seats.
“There should be an amnesty permitting process for [historic] businesses,” said Navarrette, “but there’s just not.”
And when they find themselves in violation of the rules, instead of a helping hand they are confronted with intimidating legal jargon. While the council office could play a role in making sure these historic businesses don’t go under, Navarrette says that in practice council districts tend to defer to other city departments.
CD 15 communications director Sophie Gilchrist told Random Lengths in an email that the council office “assist[s] businesses in accessing city programs, including the Legacy Business Program … While participation requires businesses to take the first step, our office is here to help them navigate the process.”
Rolled out last year, the Legacy Business Program is intended to offer grants of up to $20,000 and practical support to longtime small businesses. But Zepsa didn’t know this program existed — and it’s not currently accepting grant applications.
The owner of the building, Henry He, is hopeful that the Alhambra might get a new lease on life under new management. But the experience has left Zepsa exhausted and demoralized.
“This is not freedom,” she said. “I come from a country that was communist. I lived through the war from 1991 to 1995. I saw everything. Three years ago I became a citizen of this country of my own free will. And I already regret it.”
The City Attorney’s office did not respond in time to requests for comment.