Developers unveil plans for ambitious Ports O' Call makeover in San Pedro

Developers rolled out the plans for a new Ports O’ Call today, unveiling everything from a new name — San Pedro Public Market — to a more authentic wharf-and-warehouse look reminiscent of San Francisco’s successful waterfront.

The first phase of the ambitious $100 million waterfront makeover is slated to be finished in 2020, officials said before a press conference this afteoon.

“This has been talked about for decades,” Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “We’re finally there and we’re no longer (just) talking about it.”

The hub of the first phase will be 16 acres and 150,000 square feet of restaurants, shopping, fresh markets, boutique-style office space and more than a half-mile of waterfront promenade.

There will also be a “discovery sea park,” event space and attractions — possibly a Ferris wheel, a carousel and other interactive “seaside adventures” for families — along with an outdoor amphitheater. Some kind of amphibian-vehicle ride attraction also has been discussed as a possibility.

And sure to please local historians, San Pedro’s historic Red Car will make a retu. In a fashion similar to the line installed at The Grove, the Red Car will carry visitors up and down the project’s linear footprint.

The project, Buscaino said, is designed to showcase the “history, charm and flavor” of San Pedro.

But it also will showcase the inteational coections that intertwine at one of the world’s busiest shipping container port.

“This is both an intensely local and an intensely global place,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said at the outdoor news conference held at the southe tip of Ports O’ Call where at one point a giant container ship slipped into the chael behind the speakers to create a moving backdrop. “It’s where the neighborhood meets the world.”

The culinary focus will showcase foods coected to the ocean.

The popular Fish Market — which will be housed in a new structure on the northe end of the project and feature an overhead balcony above the promenade — will remain as a main anchor. Another “signature” restaurant at the southe end likely will be a second bookend anchor in the first phase.

Helping to design the look were designers with Disney and film industry coections.

Renderings show a project designed to reflect the warehouses and wharfs surrounding the Port of Los Angeles. It will look nothing like the replica of a quaint East Coast fishing village that the original Ports O’ Call shopping center tried to capture when it was built in the early 1960s.

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The promenade will run along the water and not meander in and out of scattered buildings as in the current Ports O’ Call design.

While an overall master plan unveiled in 2013 to rave reviews remains in place for the full 30-acre Ports O’ Call area, the first-phase rollout provides a detailed and more targeted brick-and-mortar blueprint for what comes first. Subsequent phases will be filled in based on the success of the first phase.

After three years of negotiations with the L.A. Waterfront Alliance — made up of The Ratkovich Co. and San Pedro-based Jerico Development — an agreement is in place for a 50-acre ground lease. Port officials said lease for the entire 30-acre seaside project will be presented to the harbor commission for approval sometime in April or May. Construction would begin in 2017.

In a telephone interview Tuesday, Wayne Ratkovich said the idea behind the first phase was to create a focused and proven theme that would be centered heavily around unique food, drink, shops and entertainment. That would then ensure the success of future phases, he said.

Most of the tenants won’t be inked until after a ground lease is signed and a time line is more securely in place, Ratkovich said.

“We’re going to favor those restaurants that have a unique character and a local character to them,” he said. “The San Pedro Fish Market wants to be part of the project and we want them to be part of the project.”

Otherwise, he said, “We’re not in a big rush to make commitments. We’re talking about a development that opens its doors a couple years down the road, or maybe three or four years down the road. Most tenants don’t plan that far ahead.”

The plans, Garcetti said in a telephone interview Tuesday, have “a depth and thoughtfulness” to them.

Asked what will make this effort at redeveloping Ports O’ Call different from all those that preceded it, he credited Ratkovich.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to a passionate developer who has his eyes on the details,” Garcetti said, referring to Ratkovich’s history of developing Los Angeles urban projects that include historic buildings and are some of the “most inspiring” developments in the city.

While the ground lease negotiations were expanded from 30 to 50 years, more is needed, Ratkovich said. Efforts, will continue to provide extensions for the 50-year ground lease laws imposed both by the city and state, Ratkovich said. Without that, he said, developments can quickly fall into disrepair as new private investments are hard to attract.

“None of us wants to see what happened to Ports O’ Call happen to this future investment,” Ratkovich said. A limited, locked-in lease, he said, “guarantees a deteriorating asset.”

That realization, he said, was behind the decision to “scale the project in a different way so it pays for itself instead of (initially building out) a grand, ambitious project. We wanted to get this project off the ground and to make something happen while we work on this 50-year lease issue.”

While the San Pedro Public Market won’t look anything like the old Ports O’ Call, it will harken back to the port’s roots, Ratkovich said.

“It’s part of a seaside community that has been around for a long time, so it’s not a ‘new’ place. It has some depth to it. ... It is industrial in character so the idea is to have an industrial look, something that looks like it’s been here for a good, long time.”

Glass and open-air buildings will be the norm, he said, adding that the ferry building in San Francisco also served as inspiration.

Coections also will be made to nearby destinations, including Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles and downtown San Pedro.

What about the new San Pedro Public Market name?

“We felt that San Pedro had to be identified with this project,” Ratkovich said.

It’s also a geographic designation that would have widespread recognition throughout Los Angeles, thanks to the sprawling city’s endless crisscrossing network of freeways.

“If you cruise the freeways of downtown Los Angeles, the signs everywhere say ‘San Pedro, San Pedro, San Pedro,’ ” he said. “So San Pedro is a well-identified place in Los Angeles and we think it deserves to be recognized” in the name of the new waterfront development.

“This also is publicly owned land and we want this to be a very public place,” Ratkovich said. “We borrowed the idea of public markets elsewhere, including in Seattle.”

Eventually, designers would like to move the Battleship Iowa south so that it can dock close to the new development.

“We’d love to see that happen,” Ratkovich said, adding, however, that it probably won’t happen soon due to logistics and money. Buscaino’s office estimates it would cost $2 million to $5 million to reposition the Iowa because it would require dredging.

Overall, the idea is to make the waterfront a seven-day-a-week attraction — similar to the Ports O’ Call of old in its booming years.

While the San Pedro Fish Market sees heavy weekend and holiday traffic, the area as a whole doesn’t see much regular business on other days.

Efforts to remake the area go back to the City Council tenures of Rudy Svorinich Jr. and Janice Hahn.

“Revitalizing Ports O’ Call and redeveloping our waterfront has been an issue close to my heart for decades — both as a San Pedro resident and a representative of this community,” Hahn, now the area’s congresswoman, said in a statement today.

Residents, she said, “deserve a waterfront they can be proud of — that creates jobs for local residents, attracts tourism, brings business to Downtown San Pedro, boosts local property values, and gives our families a beautiful space to properly enjoy our coastline.”

The plans unveiled today, she said, will build on other developments, including the new craft brewery Brouwerij West.

Buscaino predicted the development’s initial phase will be “the first domino” in more private investment and development to come.

“We’re dreaming big, and we’re thinking big,” he said.

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