The Harbor Area and the Palos Verdes Peninsula must’ve felt hard done by the 1961 announcement that a new Los Angeles County Courthouse branch building would be built in Torrance.
The entire South Bay/Harbor Area had been bereft of a large-scale courthouse for years. For major cases, attorneys and other involved persons would have to schlep themselves and their documents to the downtown L.A. courthouse, with some cases able to be handled at the county courthouse in Inglewood.
Ground was broken for the new courthouse in Torrance in 1964, and the building was dedicated on June 23, 1967.
Fortunately, L.A. County Supervisor Burton W. Chace, who represented the Harbor Area, took note of the judicial deficiency. In late December 1966, he convinced the Board of Supervisors to give the green light for construction of a new satellite courthouse in San Pedro.
At the time, the only courtrooms in town were two small ones located in the San Pedro Municipal Building at 638 Beacon St.
Eight bids were submitted for construction of the two-story facility to be erected on 1.75 acres at 505 S. Center St., between Fifth and Sixth streets. Coast State General Engineering Co. of Long Beach won the job with a low bid of $1.16 million.
Funding for the project came from the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, with the county set to repay the debt over a 30-year period under terms of a lease-purchase agreement.
In addition to three municipal courtrooms, plans for the 42,655-square-foot facility included offices for the municipal court clerk, district attorney, public defender, probation department and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Two of the three courtrooms were circular in design, the first such rooms in Southern California.
Supervisor Chace officiated at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new building, which was held on July 7, 1967. “The battle to bring modern, more efficient municipal court facilities to the San Pedro area has been difficult, but now the job is only a year away from reality,” he told attendees at a post-ceremony luncheon at the Pacific Trade Center building in San Pedro.
In reality, costs would rise to $1.3 million, and the courthouse would not be completed until early 1969.
Its grand opening ceremony on Feb. 28 of that year included speeches from California Supreme Court associate justice Marshall McComb, as well as from local pols John Gibson of the L.A. City Council and California State Senator Ralph Dills.
The court would go on to conduct its business without major incident until 1986, when reports of allegedly scandalous actions of its chief supervising judge, David M. Kennick, brought tension to the court.
According to San Pedro News Pilot reporter Russ Britt, “During 1986, Kennick was accused of favoritism in handing out court-appointed cases to private attorneys with whom he had financial and personal ties. Other accusations surfaced that Kennick sought sexual favors in exchange for judicial influence and asked a California Highway Patrol officer to ‘lose the paper work’ in a drunken-driving case against him.”
Kennick resigned on Jan. 1, 1987, and morale at the courthouse improved markedly.
The building remained vacant during the rest of the 2010s as the community debated what to do with the prime real estate on which it stood.
But by 2003, the court was beset by a new threat: county government budget cuts. Rumors about the cuts began spreading in late 2002. On April 14, 2003, adjudication of all criminal cases shifted to the Long Beach Superior Court, with San Pedro handling only civil cases.
The money saved came from the shuttering of the lockup facility at San Pedro, but the LAPD was angered because its officers had to spend more time commuting to a court further away from the area they patrolled.
Rumors also began to circulate that the county would close the courthouse entirely in order to further cut costs. The facility limped along for several more years until the budgetary ax finally fell in June 2014, when the county closed it permanently. All of its functions were transferred to Long Beach.
In February 2021, Supervisor Janice Hahn and Pasadena development company Genton Cockrum Partners announced plans for the construction of an eight-story mixed-use commercial-residential structure on the site.
Demolition of the old courthouse began on Feb. 9, 2022. Construction of the new project, named Acqua Via, began in Fall 2023, and is expected to be completed in late 2025. It will include 300 apartments and ground-floor retail establishments, along with 500 underground parking spaces.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
Los Angeles Times archives.
Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.
San Pedro News Pilot archives.
Torrance Press-Herald archives.
