Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Once you get past the refineries, San Pedro looks like many port cities whose generations have lived near the sea. Little homes crowd the hilly, treeless streets that climb the sweep of landscape from the docks to the Palos Verdes heights. The maritime air smells clean, even at 90 degrees. Downtown, there’s still the uncertain, patchy diversity common to ports, where ever fewer people work the docks, sail the ships and fish for a living.Even so, you think, it must be inspiring to dwell here among the inhumanly scaled attributes of modern ocean commerce, breathing sea air.