Dustin Trani is standing between empty tables a few hours before dinner service, checking the angle of a chair, and through the windows behind him the harbor is doing what it always does: cranes, ships, and a bridge that's perpetually under some kind of construction. He runs his hand across one of the marble tabletops. These slabs used to sit in a steam room in this same building, decades before anyone thought to seat a party of four on top of them.
That detail is the whole story in miniature. The Majestic, which reopened in December 2025 inside the restored Harbor House on Beacon Street, gets described in most coverage as a new restaurant in an old building. That framing misses what actually happened this year. Harbor House was dedicated as the Army and Navy YMCA in 1926. Filippo Trani, Dustin's great-grandfather, opened his first Majestic Cafe a few blocks away in 1925. Run the math and 2026 is the hundredth year for both the building and the family now occupying its ground floor. Neither of them planned it that way. They landed on the same anniversary from opposite directions, and the space between those two timelines is where the real story sits.
Harbor House wasn't always a landmark waiting for someone to remember it. When it opened in 1926, designed by the architectural firm Jay, Rogers and Stevenson, it was built to do exactly what The Majestic is doing now: put on a show. The five-story Mediterranean Revival building held 300 dormitory rooms, a gymnasium with a suspended running track, a swimming pool, boxing and wrestling rooms, a banquet hall, and a stage. During World War II it gave temporary quarters and recreation to more than four million servicemen stationed at Fort MacArthur, and its entertainment drew name talent from Hollywood, including Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.
That's not incidental trivia for a plaque. It means the building's current identity, a dining room with a red-curtained stage that hosts live music, dance, comedy, and magic, is closer to a revival than an invention. The gymnasium Dustin's team restored, polished floors and all, with the original sloped track still ringing the upper perimeter, isn't a design flourish borrowed from somewhere else. It's the same room, doing the same job it did for sailors on shore leave more than eighty years ago.
Here's the part that generic coverage skips entirely. After the war, Harbor View House converted to civilian use in 1947, housing young travelers and senior citizens. Then, starting in September 1967, it became something else altogether: a state-licensed residential facility for the mentally ill, run by the nonprofit HealthView, licensed for 204 adult residential beds plus an 83-bed intermediate care nursing facility. It held that role for more than fifty years, until November 2018, and during that stretch it was reportedly the largest facility of its kind in California.
That means the building's public performance function, the stage, the gym, the banquet room built to host a crowd, simply went dark for half a century. The 1994 seismic retrofit after the Northridge earthquake even filled in the original swimming pool to build offices. Harbor House kept its bones and its historic designation the entire time, but the version of the building that put on shows for Bob Hope's audience wasn't the version most of San Pedro grew up knowing. Most residents under sixty have only ever known this address as a care facility, not a venue.
Filippo Trani never saw any of that unfold. His original Majestic Cafe sat on lower Seventh Street next to a check-cashing storefront, with the ILWU dispatch office in the basement, serving longshoremen chili beans, beef stew, and wet beef sandwiches. In an interview with San Pedro Today, Dustin described the origin plainly:
"A dumpy little pool hall next to the check-cashing place. That's what they started with."
The restaurant later relocated to Sixth Street, closed, and the name disappeared for a generation. The space eventually became the Green Onion. By the time Dustin was coming up in the kitchen at J. Trani's Ristorante, "Majestic" was closer to family folklore than an active address.
The developer Hillcrest Company bought Harbor House in April 2018 and brought in the architecture firm Omgivning to lead an adaptive reuse project, converting the building into 100 residential apartments, with 10 units set aside as affordable housing, alongside roughly 15,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. The renovation, completed in 2023 and later recognized with a 2025 Preservation Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy, kept the original tilework, the hand-painted ceiling art, and the gymnasium's running track intact while modernizing the units above.
The ground floor is where the Trani name came back. The Majestic occupies the space with chandeliers overhead, candles in a working fireplace, and that red-curtained stage anchoring one end of the room. The marble tables from the old steam room are back in circulation, repurposed at Dustin's suggestion rather than discarded. Downstairs, in what used to be the building's boiler room, a speakeasy called The Boiler Room has been under construction since the restaurant's opening, approved for up to 92 seats with a 30-foot library bar and a password required at the door. As of the most recent reporting this year it still hadn't opened, though the restaurant upstairs has been serving nightly since its December debut.
If you're deciding whether tonight is the night to finally walk through those doors, here's what's live as of this year:
None of this required waiting for West Harbor's grand opening. The Majestic's December debut came weeks before West Harbor even announced the six additional dining concepts slated to round out its 2026 lineup across the water.
There's a version of this story that treats Harbor House as a blank canvas the Trani family got lucky enough to fill. The actual sequence runs the other direction. This building has been putting on shows since 1926. It stopped for fifty years because its job changed, not because the stage disappeared. What reopened in December 2025 wasn't a restaurant discovering a landmark. It was a landmark getting its original assignment back, with a family whose own history runs exactly as long standing in the room to do it.
If you live in San Pedro, you don't need a reason to walk into a building you've passed a hundred times. But it helps to know that the stage inside is older than almost anyone currently eating dinner in front of it, and that the coincidence of two hundredth anniversaries landing on the same address in the same year isn't the kind of detail that shows up on a menu.
For more on what's shaping daily life across San Pedro, from the waterfront to the bluffs, Selling San Pedro keeps a close eye on the neighborhood beyond the transaction. When the conversation eventually turns to your own address on this peninsula, Gary Krill has spent decades getting to know these streets the same way Harbor House got its stage back: one restoration at a time.
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