This Just In: Planning Hearing on 3/20 for Walker's Cafe Redevelopment
Here's How to Share Your Views
Dear Friends of Walker’s Cafe,
TWO YEARS AGO, Prospect Group unveiled their plans for a giant, 3,500+ sqf, two-story development in the back of the Walker’s Cafe lot.
Now, the plans will be reviewed at a City Planning Hearing on Thursday, March 20.
As they stand, the current plans would mean the death of Walker’s Cafe.
Restaurant consultants who have reviewed the plans with us agree: Prospect Group seems to be mothballing the cafe. There is no cafe operator involved, no restaurant consultants, no roadmap for reopening.
The current plans leave no space for a full kitchen, storage, enough outdoor seating, and the facilities a restaurant needs to survive in today’s market. All that space is being sacrificed to build a giant house.
Walker’s Cafe – and San Pedro – deserves better.
“How do I help?”
Share your views with Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council this Saturday, March 8th at 2:30 pm (online). Find the login details here.
Email the City of LA’s Department of Planning. Feel free to customize this email template:
To: monica.taimoori@lacity.org, councilmember.mcosker@lacity.org, Pamela.Thornton@lacity.org
Re: Walker’s Cafe - ZA-2023-7218-CDP-CU-CUB-MEL-HCA
Dear Ms. Taimoori, dear Councilmember,
I am writing to express my strong opposition to the development planned at 700 W. Paseo del Mar, San Pedro 90731, directly behind the landmarked Walker’s Cafe (HCM #1267).
Founded in 1946 by a Navy veteran and his wife, Walker’s Cafe is the oldest surviving restaurant in San Pedro and one of the oldest in all of Los Angeles. It’s a vital piece of San Pedro’s military history and social fabric. It was a community hub for nearly eighty years, featured in iconic LA movies like Chinatown, and drew fans from all over the world. It obtained landmark designation in 2022 as a result of a grassroots campaign with more than three thousand supporters.
Since purchasing the property in March 2022, Prospect Group has been alarmingly unwilling to hear the community’s concerns and prioritize this iconic legacy business. The proposed development in the back is completely out of scale with the neighborhood and the adjacent single-story homes. More importantly, however, it paints Walker’s Cafe into a corner and would make it impossible for the cafe to reopen.
The development would rob the cafe of much-needed space for storage, dumpsters, outdoor seating, grease interceptors, a full working kitchen, and the other facilities the restaurant would need to be code-compliant and thrive in today’s market.
We urgently ask you not to approve the plans as they stand, but to request they be amended to give the cafe enough space to operate.
Furthermore, Prospect Group’s planning application treats permitting for the cafe and entitlements for the development behind it as a single issue. From the community’s perspective, these are separate issues. We ask that they be treated separately, rather than as one bundled application.
Thank you for your consideration.
[name]
Stay tuned for login details for the online hearing on Thursday, March 20th at 9:30 am. Save the date!