Beacon Street

Beacon Street

by Garrison Frost

I come only recently to San Pedro. And so I’m in the same position as many of those who have only experienced the city in recent years. I can appreciate that this place has a history, I just don’t know that history very well.

A while back I was walking around the San Pedro municipal building and came across a cool old drinking fountain. On the fountain was some kind of plaque that talked about Beacon Street. At the time, I didn’t really know much about Beacon Street or why someone would want to save a drinking fountain from it.

Some time later, I was browsing around the California State Library’s website and came across a bunch of pictures of San Pedro’s Beacon Street from the late 60s and early 70s. They showed an old downtown, ravaged by age, but still with the bones of a thriving old commercial district. I wondered why I hadn’t seen this area before. I had been to San Pedro many, many times, walked the downtown, circled the area in my car, and I had never seen this Beacon Street. Where the hell was it?

A quick Google search answered my questions. The Beacon Street in the photographs was gone, long gone, done in by that old city scraper, the redevelopment agency. You can learn more about the project here. From the pictures, it would seem that Beacon Street was pretty far gone by the time the government stepped it to get rid of it. I have no idea if the project was controversial. Perhaps the locals were glad to see it go. I wonder if people regret the loss of Beacon Street now. Or are they merely pleased that the project didn’t extend further toward Sixth and Seventh streets, to build over the last few blocks of old San Pedro?

Anyway, here are the pictures. The one at the top goes way back to the beginning of the 20^th Century, and probably shows Beacon Street at its best, when it was a thriving commercial street serving the port and beyond. The ones below were taken by William Reagh in the latter part of the 1960s and early 1970s. Some from this latter set show the actual demolition taking place. All photos are the property of the California State Library.

(April 25, 2007)