WASHINGTON: They’re the little guys in the push to remake Ports O’ Call Village, San Pedro’s waterfront shopping attraction built in the early 1960s. The small, family-owned shops — Candy Town, Botanica, Figments, the Purple Store and others like them — face an Oct. 2 eviction by the Port of Los Angeles, the landlord, to make way for a new attraction, the San Pedro Public Market. And the shop owners, crying foul, are prepared to fight. The 15 shop owners, who will gather for a news conference Tuesday, have hired an attorney to file a claim for damages with the Los Angeles city clerk, a precursor to filing a lawsuit. “We all understand progress,” said Ports O’ Call shop owner Bobbi Lisk. “(But) our objections are what they’ve always been.” Plans originally called for construction of the new San Pedro Public Market to begin at the north end of the village, putting the small shops in Phase 2 of the development, Lisk said. “We’re now in the middle of Phase 1,” she said, and being forced to move out abruptly.
According to the claim, the project and environmental impact report, approved by the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners in September 2009, stated that Ports O’ Call Village shops “would be relocated during Phase I construction until the new San Pedro Public Market would be completed.” Port officials have met with the tenants 15 times since 2014 to keep them apprised of redevelopment progress, said port spokesman Phillip Sanfield. Included in those updates, he said, was the “timing for expected move-out dates based on the port’s obligations in the new development lease that was approved in June of 2016. The redevelopment of the site requires that all buildings on the waterfront be removed to build the public promenade and town square projects.”
The port, he said, told tenants a year ago that the area would need to be vacated during the summer of 2017, but extended that to beyond Labor Day after input from shop owners. The port also has reached out to the city and other organizations to help owners find and transition into a new space outside of the village. Crafted at the Port of LA or downtown San Pedro often have been suggested as possible alternatives for the shops being forced to move. But relocating to other vacant shop space isn’t as easy as it sounds, said Lisk whose Figments craft store has been in the village for 14 years after it was on Sixth Street for 30 years. “They say, ‘Why don’t you all just move?’ ” she said. “They make it sound simple. I have 500 square feet here and there are no places even under 1,000 square feet in downtown. And none of those landlords has offered us a decent rent. … The term ‘just move’ is an oxymoron.”