West Street was only a few long city blocks from the main channel and served as the western limit of the young city of San Pedro. Beyond it was the rolling hills of the former rancho that gave them their name. As San Pedro began to materialize into a port city worthy of worldly things, a simple directional name was no longer sufficient, and Pacific Avenue was born. Even the switch from street to avenue showed how much hope the thoroughfare carried for the townsfolk. From its beginning, Pacific Avenue was intended as a major commercial center. No houses were built there because they would just have to be moved one day. Pacific Avenue was a promise San Pedro made to itself.
The first person to make good on that promise was Edouard Amar, a town pioneer most famous for his thousands of sheep which roamed the peninsula. Amar built the first two brick commercial buildings on Pacific Avenue in 1913 — one garage and a row of stores on the northeast corner of 12th Street. A grand boulevard stretched north and south from these two seeds of development to join the city and the countryside. Year after year, more buildings dotted the avenue between the official commercial borders of 3rd and 14th streets. Amar further solidified his place as the father of Pacific Avenue by adding the California Theatre building at 11th Street in 1921. The following year, Pacific Avenue was celebrated for finally meeting its potential with the installation of state-of-the-art ornamental light posts up and down the street. Town boosters proclaimed it San Pedro’s “Great White Way,” on par with New York’s Broadway and Chicago’s State Street. This baptism by innovation fueled more development, attracting big-name chains like J.C. Penney, Kress, and Montgomery Ward to stake their claims along Pacific Avenue.
For 60 years, Pacific Avenue was the major retail center of San Pedro. From department stores to five-and-dime stores and everything in between. Anything one could want or need was sold somewhere on the avenue. If you needed a car, San Pedro’s motor row was legendary. Pacific Avenue’s supremacy didn’t start to crack until the 1970s when new shopping centers and the extension of the Harbor Freeway terminus to Gaffey Street expanded and recentered the idea of commercial areas in town. Soon the convenience of chains on Gaffey Street and Western Avenue became more important than the variety of retail in downtown. As businesses moved or shuttered by the 1980s, Pacific Avenue started to show its age and obsolescence.
In the years since its heyday, Pacific Avenue has adapted as best as it could. It doesn’t have the same retail presence, but it is still the heart of San Pedro. There is no better litmus test for how San Pedro is doing than driving from one end of Pacific Avenue to the other. Every single one of our issues are there on display, including gangs, drugs, homelessness, and mental health issues. One way to help combat these issues would be to invest in the commercial core between 3rd and 14th streets. I don’t mean giving developers carte blanche to tear it out but to rehabilitate the fantastic historical architecture and give Pacific Avenue a new lease on life.
For the most part, historic Pacific Avenue remains intact. Even Edouard Amar’s first two buildings are still standing. The garage at 1130 Pacific Avenue has spent most of its life in the automotive industry. In its early days, it was the Pacific Garage; later, it was an auto parts store. Now, the garage hides its massive square footage in plain sight behind a dated stone façade. In 1923, Amar added two stories to his original row of storefronts at 12th Street. The building housed offices, the California Hotel, and even the famed Rose Room bar. Great cultural footholds are already leading the way to a rebirth, like San Pedro City Ballet, the National Watercolor Society, and The Sardine. We need innovation to light up the street again a hundred years later. Let’s put our heads together and give it a good think.
Pacific Avenue needs to be protected at all costs. It is our parade route, the spiritual artery of old San Pedro, grown with the promise our ancestors made to themselves and to us. spt