Drive-ins land new role as land values, market change.

For almost 40 years, the 13-acre, drive-in movie theater in San Pedro was a place where people were captivated by the films, and by the dates sitting alongside them in their cars.

Those romantic days are long gone. The San Pedro drive-in is now a place where you can store your family heirlooms or start a new business.

Those 13 acres may be less entertaining, but they are certainly more profitable for Los Angeles-based Pacific Theatres Corp.

In the mid-1980s, Pacific Theatres began converting the drive-in into a mini-storage center and industrial park for small businesses. And the company is still tweaking its conversion concepts.

The storage center is more than 95 percent leased, and the industrial park is 75 percent occupied. Several laid-off engineers who toiled for years at the nearby aerospace giants throughout the South Bay now call Pacific Theatres' low-slung, nondescript Worldport Business Center their entrepreneurial home.

The golden age of the drive-in was during the post-World War II year, when the concepts of suburbia and multiplex theaters were still only emerging. In that era, most moviegoers went either to the large downtown movie theaters or to drive-ins situated on the fringes of the city.

Milt Moritz, Pacific Theatres' spokesman, recounts, "As the city expanded and the malls were built, that cut down on the need for drive-ins. As the value of land increased, we found we had better usage for that acreage. Besides, where can you find 13 acres of land in the hub of a city that are underdeveloped?"

The drive-ins' soaring real estate values doomed them. The better the locations, the quicker they have been converted to other uses.

Pacific T heatres is the largest theater circuit based in Los Angeles and the 15th largest in the U.S. At one time, the family-owned circuit had more than 100 drive-in movie screens in its territory, that extends to Hawaii and north to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Pacific Theatres has just 10 drive-ins left in Los Angeles. Some of those - like the ones in Winnetka and Pico Rivera - are still doing well. However, Pacific Theatres has converted several into shopping centers and other industrial uses that are more profitable than the fading drive-in business.

About 20 years ago, Pacific Theatres and other drive-in owners started the conversions. Drive-ins only operate at night, but theater owners discovered they could use the space during the day for swap meets and as parking lots for park-and-ride commuters.

Many drive-ins today are used for swap meets, which are especially popular with the city's Latino population. Southland Latinos enjoy the bazaar atmosphere that rekindles memories of the marketplaces of their homelands in Mexico and Central America.

During the 1980s, Pacific Theatres turned its Pickwick drive-in Burbank into a shopping center. In Buena Park and Hawaii, Pacific Theatres, converted drive-ins into storage facilities where consumers can rent space to store their things.

The self-storage concept has boomed in Los Angeles County, where there are now about 700 such compelexes. In San Pedro, Pacific Theatres decided to experiment with the concept in 1985, and now, nearly 10 years later, it has developed a high-tech facility that is heavy on security.

Pacific Theatres has created two divisions - Mini-Pac Inc. and the Document Box - and has invested more than $10 million to develop its San Pedro property into the mini-storage and industrial park facilities. The Worldport industrial park sits adjacent to the storage buildings, and there is no vestige of the old San Pedro drive-in.

Pacific Theatres' concept for Mini-Pac is to offer consumers a secure storage facility. The big problem with such facilities around the country has been security. Often, storage customers rip off neighboring storage units.

To prevent such intrusions, Mini-Pac has been built like a small prison - with gates, closed-circuit TVs and enough mesh wiring strung up over each unit to keep out all but criminal geniuses.

"With our computerized security system, we have foiled every break-in attempt," observes Frans Verschoor, director of Mini-Pac and Worldport. "We had a doctor who claimed that someone had stolen stuff from his unit. But when we looked it up on our (close-circuit TV) photo file, there he was in his locker (on) the date he said something was taken. It was embarrassing for him, but many people try to report these for insurance purposes."

Mini-Pac at San Pedro has storage unit rental rates ranging from $30 to $200 a month. There are 29 different sizes of storage units available.

The Document Box is a storage-and-retrieval services that enables corporations to rent space at discounted rates. For 26 cents to 30 cents per container per month, companies may store their documents and have them retrieved via fax, for which they and are charged $1 for up to 10 pages. These documents can be accessed with a call to Verschoor's staff.

Despite these high-tech services, there are people in the Southland who still would rather have a drive-in movie theater in their neighborhood.

"Every time we close a drive-in, we get people who call and are saddened," Moritz said. "But it gets to a certain point where we can't operate there any more. There may not be as many as there used to be, but there will always be drive-ins."