September 23, 2026
San Pedro is a neighborhood sitting next to The Port of Los Angeles in Long Beach. From its earliest days the neighborhood attracted a widely diverse community. It is home to the largest Italian-American community in Southern California and is also considered the heart of the Croatian and Norwegian communities in Los Angeles. The Croatian community, originally composed of seafarers and fishermen from the Dalmatia region, has been present in San Pedro since the settlement began more than 200 years ago.
We were in San Pedro to visit the annual cannabis convention that takes place in a warehouse down by the port. As most of you know, our sons, Jake and Ben, own a cannabis company called Dompen which they started over ten years ago. The convention provides a forum for producers of cannabis products to introduce their goods to buyers from dispensaries. Although the sale of cannabis is legal in California, it is still technically Federally illegal. It is, therefore, somewhat surreal to see so many companies openly shopping their wares.
Somebody is apparently doing well in the industry. This Lamborghini was parked outside the convention.
For a neighborhood that is known for its Italian, Norwegian, and Croatian communities, it is perhaps surprising that San Pedro’s most well known attraction is Korean. The Korean Friendship Bell, located on a point overlooking the neighborhood and surrounding ocean, is made of over seventeen tons of copper, tin, gold, nickel, lead and phosphorus. One of the largest bells in the world, it was presented by the South Korean government to the United States to celebrate its bicentennial. The pavilion that houses the bell was built by South Korean craftsmen over a period of ten months. Movie enthusiasts may recognize it as the location of the jewel exchange in the 1995 movie, The Usual Suspects.
If you were a lighthouse keeper you could do worse than the Below Point Fermin Light, which sits on the point just below the Friendship Bell. Built in 1874, it is housed in a beautiful old mansion.
We drove by Redmen’s Hall, a local lodge of The Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization established in North America in 1834. The Order’s rituals and regalia are modeled after those assumed at the time of its formation to be used by Native Americans. Despite the name, the Order was formed solely by, and for, white men. The whites only rule was, in fact, part of the Order’s bylaws until 1974. In 1935, the organization claimed a membership of about half a million people, now it has a little more than 15,000. It’s hard to imagine in these more enlightened times, that it exists at all.
