The Green Onion in San Pedro is closing, and man, this one hurts to write.
The Green Onion is closing. You know, the Mexican place at 6th and Beacon that’s been there forever? Yeah, that one.
(Fun fact: Before Green Onion, that location used to be the old Trani’s before it moved to 9th and Pacific Ave.)
The familiar corner of 6th and Beacon where The Green Onion welcomed San Pedro for decades.
Anyway, another Pedro landmark is going the way of others, back to dust.
I flip houses for a living. I’m a real estate agent and investor by trade. I look at properties all day, figure out what needs fixing, and what’s worth the investment. But before all that, I’m just a San Pedro kid who spent much of my twenties and thirties eating chips and salsa in those booths hanging with friends, watching Dodger games.
I’m Mexican, just like half this town (The other half Croatian and Italian), and on any given night, the crowd at The Green Onion was largely a reflection of that.
The owners, Bob and Eileen, didn’t just serve food. They created a third place. Their staff became family for many townies.
The past several weeks, I saw people posting on Facebook about how their whole family worked there over the years, kids, grandkids, everybody. One guy posted a picture of his dad doing the drywall work when they built the place out. That’s San Pedro right there.
A look back at the drywall work that helped build The Green Onion into the landmark it became.
Someone wrote something that really got me. They talked about how kids used to get free Jello with their meals, and how that’s just gone now. “A relic, a memory, a thing of the past,” they said.
When did that stuff disappear? When did a place remembering your usual order become rare instead of normal?
Here’s the thing that’s eating at me. I’m in real estate. I see the development happening downtown and on the waterfront And yeah, it’s complicated.
San Pedro is changing. That’s just a fact. West Harbor is going up where Ports O’ Call used to be. $170 million project with restaurants, shops, a Ferris wheel, an amphitheater. Opens late next year. It’s gonna bring jobs. It’s gonna bring visitors. That’s good for business, good for the port, good for a lot of people.
Rancho San Pedro is getting completely rebuilt. Going from 479 units to over 1,500 new homes. That’s more housing, and we need that. Our kids can’t afford to live here. Young families are getting pushed out to Riverside, to Lancaster. If we don’t build, where are they supposed to go?
Alta Sea is bringing science and tech jobs to the waterfront. The Little Italy district is getting investment. Properties that were run down for years are getting fixed up. I see it in my business. People want to live here again. That’s not nothing.
New buildings going up. Property values climbing. Some people call it gentrification. Others say we need the housing.
And you know what? They’re both right, and that’s what makes this so hard.
We DO need more housing. More than half of San Pedro residents are “rent burdened,” paying too much for housing. The vacancy rate is below 3 percent. So yeah, we need housing, but we also need housing people can actually afford.
Our kids can’t afford to live here anymore. Families are getting pushed out. I see it every day. But The Green Onion isn’t closing because the food got bad or people stopped coming. It’s closing because the dirt under it is worth more than everything that happened inside it. That’s a tough pill to swallow.
Somebody asked in one of the Reddit groups: “Are we headed in the right direction or have we lost our way? Is the world we’re building for us or for some elite version of what we thought we’d all be?”
The farewell sign covered in messages from loyal Green Onion customers during its final days.
Honestly, I don’t know. I really don’t.
What I do know is we can build housing without tearing down everything that makes San Pedro actually San Pedro.
We can move forward without forgetting where we came from.
The Green Onion was a place where regular working people could take their families without breaking the bank. Where you belonged. Where your money was good and so were you. Not fancy, just real. That’s important.
That’s worth something even if it doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet.
So what’s going in there now? Probably condos most young people will struggle to afford.
But maybe we can learn something here. Maybe developers can start thinking about what was there before. Maybe new businesses can actually try to be part of the community instead of just taking from it. Maybe we can ask for progress that doesn’t mean losing everything we care about. We cover more local stories and housing insights on our real estate blog if you want to dive deeper.
Bob, Eileen, everyone at The Green Onion, thanks. Thanks for the chips and salsa, the margaritas, the Dodger nights, the free Jello. For so many locals, the Green Onion San Pedro meant more than food, it was a piece of home.
So here’s what I’m saying: let’s not just accept that our favorite places have to die for progress.
Let’s support the local spots still hanging on. Let’s tell our city council we want development that includes spaces for regular people, not just whoever can pay top dollar.
The Green Onion is closing. But the question is still open: What kind of San Pedro are we building?
I know which one I want.
Sometimes places like this remind us why home matters in the first place. And as San Pedro keeps changing, our team at John Medina Buys Houses is here living through it too, just trying to hold onto the good parts the same way everyone else is.
If you ever just want to talk about your home, your options, or what’s happening in the neighborhood, here’s where to find us.
