Joe Buscaino — Inventing a Legacy Before There Is One
And continuing the erasure of ones that took decades to create
To the shock and surprise of many on Dec. 9, 2022, the very first day of the new Los Angeles city council’s term, a motion was forwarded to the city council and subsequently placed on the City Council agenda by Council President Paul Krekorian requesting the Port of Los Angeles rename a portion of Harbor Boulevard after outgoing CD 15 representative Joe Buscaino. The one who thought he could be mayor of LA.
What is awkward about this is that this proposal did not go through the usual committees nor did any of the neighborhood councils have time to file community impact statements or for the public to wake up from their winter slumber to even comment on this political backslapping on the way out the door. The motion was not even discussed but passed on a voice vote on the consent calendar along with the naming of a few other streets for outgoing councilmen. Outside the flawed process and doubtful need to name anything after Buscaino, there has been no outcry calling for even so much as the renaming of the sidewalk in front of his house, much less a dozen blocks of a boulevard in his honor. I fail to see the point of this exercise.
And frankly, I believe there’s considerable public opinion that would support banning any public edifice or street being named in honor of any politician until after being out of office for 10 years or being dead. By comparison, there’s nothing labeled with either former CD15 council reps Rudy Svorinich Jr. or Janice Hahn. There’s a park named for Joan Milke Flores and a boulevard named after John S. Gibson. The park and the boulevard were renamed long after either representative served in office. The latter served some 30 years on the city council, long before there were term limits. It should take a lot more than doing your job as a well-paid public servant to get such an honorific.
This kind of gratuitous naming of things at the whim of elected or appointed bodies strikes me as the height of arrogance and utter disregard for public sentiment or consent. It’s the same kind of process that got the historic Pepper Tree Plaza renamed Piazza Miramare or a piece of Sixth Street named Little Italy, while ignoring other nationalities’ contributions and historical facts while inventing some fiction out of whole cloth to satisfy someone’s ego.
Show us one significant project that Buscaino accomplished. Perhaps the two temporary homeless shelters could be renamed the Buscaino Villas. As far as I can tell, he has spent the majority of his efforts in office chasing homeless residents off the streets while ignoring the aging sidewalks and curbs where the destitute reside. Here in the central part of lower San Pedro, which has suffered the brunt of the crisis, we have the oldest portion of the public infrastructure in almost all of the 15th District and yet the only time anyone seems to get a new sidewalk replaced is when a developer is forced to do it. And this is even after the City of LA had a $1.2 billion settlement to repair sidewalks.
As of this week, the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council’s Port Committee passed a motion that strongly opposes the City Council’s request to rename portions of Harbor Boulevard “Buscaino Way’’ and implores the Board of Harbor Commissioners to deny said request. The request should immediately be sent back to the City Council for the appropriate level of review by committees, NCs and the public. For transparency, I’m the chairman of this committee, but I believe there will be overwhelming support for our motion once it comes to a vote with the full council.
Still, this self-aggrandizement ignores a number of things that should be named after our prominent citizens. For instance, Bartlett Square is just a sign at the corner of Beacon and 11th streets. It is in honor of Father Art Bartlett who was as close to a hero or saint as one could get here in San Pedro. In his eulogy at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church it was said, “Historically, he was very passionate about social justice … He founded Beacon House, a residential treatment and recovery program for men. He opened up the Elks Club to women and minorities and a few years ago, the city dedicated a square in town in his honor. He will be deeply missed and his impact on us and his love of this community and town won’t be forgotten.”
Bartlett Square deserves more than a sign to honor a great man and his legacy after serving this community for 60 years.
Then there is Bea Atwood Hunt, a woman of singular focus and the one who fought the Port of LA for the removal of the Union Oil tank farm at the base of Crescent Street at what is now the 22nd Street Park. Bea worked tirelessly (and often single handedly) for over 30 years to get these toxic tanks removed. And she won the war, finally. By rights this park should be named in her honor as the community activist who took on the system and won — but sadly was never recognized before her death.
Are there others who haven’t had the privilege of being paid high-salaries to do good work in our communities? Yes, the list is longer than you would expect. And most of them wouldn’t be known to Krekorian or even Buscaino or any of the new residents who have moved into the high-priced apartments.
In the meantime, we have the ongoing erasure of local culture with the eviction of Utro’s Cafe similar to that of Ports O’ Call Restaurant, at what is now being reinvented with the misnomer, West Harbor. Utro’s Cafe is not unlike Walkers Cafe where the food was mostly burgers and beer but the memorabilia reeks of the history and humor that only the locals get.
This “grand development” is being celebrated as the development that will “save San Pedro” while destroying what little is left of the old. The POLA and the Jerico Development have gotten rid of three of the highest grossing restaurants on the San Pedro Waterfront — Acapulco, the San Pedro Fish Market and Ports O’ Call. All of which hired hundreds of local workers and had long track records of success — and for what?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not adamantly against anything new. Just give me some good architecture, some significant public art and something with historically relevant context. This is not too much to ask in the largest and wealthiest city in California — being that San Pedro is still connected to the greater metropolis. Yet the lack of both historical perspective and inclusionary decision making brings the kind of insular solutions that are an impediment to any visionary change or consensus.
In the end, the Buscaino street naming needs to be stopped if only because his recent job announcement of working for Ballard Partners, a Florida-based lobbying firm with connections to Gov. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump!