The down-on-its-luck Ports O' Call Village in San Pedro is going to get a big fancy makeover with new restaurants and retail, a boutique hotel, a market square, and a Thirteenth Street gateway to connect the area to downtown San Pedro. The Port of LA's harbor commission voted yesterday voted to go ahead on a deal with the LA Waterfront Alliance, made up of local developers The Ratkovich Company (most recently seen creating Playa Vista's Hercules Campus office space and acquiring Downtown's Macy's fortress for a big overhaul) and SP-based Jerico Development. AECOM will serve as project architect and planner and the Waterford Group will be the hospitality consultant. Ports O' Call was originally developed in the 1960s and right now has about 150,000 square feet of retaurant and retail, with existing leases set to expire at the end of 2014.
The harbor commission put out a request for qualifications last year, looking for a "comprehensive development of the Ports O' Call site that would contribute to the transformation of the San Pedro waterfront and adjacent downtown San Pedro into a vibrant, world-class urban visitor-serving destination," according to the report (pdf) on the agreement with the LA Waterfront Alliance. It adds that "Development of the Ports O' Call site has long been seen as the critical component for a successful transformation of the waterfront." To attract developers to the site, the Port has been working its ass off overhauling the area over the last few years--they helped bring the Crafted marketplace and the USS Iowa battleship, have scheduled more public events, and have created more public recreation areas.
In addition to all that development, the LA Waterfront Alliance has will take the Urban Land Institutes advice to link Ports O' Call and the waterfront to downtown SP, to embrace "the visual aspects of the working port," and to keep successful retail tenants. They had also proposed a live-work piece, but that was found to violate Tidelands Trust requirements.
According to the Daily Breeze, the Port will now work with the developers for about a year to create a final plan. [Image via Yelp]
· Could San Pedro's Ports O' Call Market Become 'Disneyland By the Sea' Once More? [Curbed LA]
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