By Devonte Barr, Columnist
By now, most of San Pedro is aware of West Harbor, the replacement for Ports O’ Call Village which was torn down five years ago to make way for this new development. What few may know is that 14 years ago, Eric Johnson and Jerico Development submitted their FIFA Fan Zone application—a move that set the entire timeline in motion. A few days before the opening, I decided to head down to see for myself what was becoming West Harbor.
One of the first people I saw when I strolled through the construction site was Eric Johnson—President of Jerico Development. I quickly found myself in a very unplanned conversation with him, and I learned even quicker that the Fan Zone represents something much larger than a World Cup celebration: proof that San Pedro’s waterfront can become a place where people choose to spend an entire day.
For decades, San Pedro has wrestled with its identity—beach town, working port, arts district, commuter city. Johnson sees the problem differently than most: the waterfront has been held back not by what it is, but by the belief that it needed to choose one answer. That layered identity is not a liability but an advantage.
“San Pedro is much more than just a beach city,” he said.
The harbor’s advantage, in his view, is not that it competes with Huntington Beach or Newport Beach, but that it offers something those cities cannot: a working waterfront, international culture, historic neighborhoods and access to downtown Los Angeles. That layered identity—port and community, working and recreational, local and connected—is what West Harbor is designed to activate rather than erase.
Jerico Development was founded in 1984 by a family with business interests in San Pedro since the early 20th century and who plan to remain part of the community they’re building in.
For years, proposals circulated for the former Ports O’ Call site—hotels, casinos, traditional destination projects. Jerico rejected that approach entirely. Those developments promised economic activity but failed to capture local imagination, and Johnson wasn’t willing to repeat that mistake in a community where he planned to stay.
The goal, Johnson explained, was never simply to construct buildings. It was to create what he repeatedly described as a “multi-day area” — a destination where visitors arrive in the morning, stay into the evening, return the following day and become participants in the local economy rather than simply passing through it.
This summer’s FIFA Fan Zone served as a preview. Tenants are expected to move into West Harbor by the end of the year.
The Fish Market, one of the nation’s top-performing fish restaurants, is currently in planning and design stages for its permanent space—a build-out expected to take approximately two years. Following that completion, a hotel will anchor the waterfront’s northern edge, the final major component of the West Harbor vision.
Johnson designs West Harbor with younger demographics in mind—people in their twenties and thirties. He believes they’re the demographic most likely to shape repeat visitation and weekend destination choices, the people who decide where to spend leisure time and which waterfront becomes a habit.
Throughout the interview, Johnson never mentioned square footage or profit margins. Instead, he spoke about bringing something unique, authentic, and fun to the waterfront.
He described the waterfront not as real estate to be developed into just anything, but a public place people would actually use—a place where routines form, where people belong. When he talked about the multi-day area, he wasn’t calculating visitor spending; he was imagining someone arriving in the morning, staying into the evening, then deciding to come back.
That shift from extraction to participation seemed to be the entire point. For Johnson, West Harbor’s success would be measured in whether San Pedro became a place people chose to return to—not as a one-time event, but as a habit, a destination worth the drive, a weekend ritual.
The Fan Zone proved the concept works—it showed for the first time in years that San Pedro’s waterfront could be real and alive, not just theoretical. West Harbor now stands in its final stages with buildouts, tenant finalization (which hasn’t been confirmed), and space activation. The concept is proven once but can it continue? What remains is execution.