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Port of Los Angeles

Harbor in Los Angeles, California

  • 10 min read
  • 6 chapters
Port of Los Angeles
Rennett Stowe from USA · CC BY 2.0

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The port has 25 cargo terminals, 82 container cranes, eight container terminals, and 113 miles (182 km) of on-dock rail. The port's top imports are typically furniture, automobile parts, apparel, footwear, and electronics. In 2019, the port's top exports were wastepaper, pet and animal feed, scrap metal and soybeans. In 2020, the port's top three trading partners were China (including Hong Kong), Japan, and Vietnam. In 2022, the port, together with the adjoining Port of Long Beach, were considered amongst the world's least efficient ports by the World Bank and IHS Markit citing union protectionism and a lack of automation.

History

In 1542, Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo discovered the "Bay of Smokes." The south-facing San Pedro Bay was originally a shallow mudflat, too soft to support a wharf. Visiting ships had two choices: stay far out at anchor and have their goods and passengers ferried to shore, or beach themselves. That sticky process is described in Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., who was a crew member on an 1834 voyage that visited San Pedro Bay. Phineas Banning greatly improved shipping when he dredged the channel to Wilmington in 1871 to a depth of 10 feet (3.0 m). The port handled 50,000 tons of shipping that year. Banning owned a stagecoach line with routes connecting San Pedro to Salt Lake City, Utah, and Yuma, Arizona, and in 1868 he built a railroad to connect San Pedro Bay to Los Angeles, the first in the area.

After Banning's death in 1885, his sons pursued their interests in promoting the port, which handled 500,000 tons of shipping in that year. The Southern Pacific Railroad and Collis P. Huntington wanted to create Port Los Angeles at Santa Monica and built the Long Wharf there in 1893. However, the Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and U.S. Senator Stephen White pushed for federal support of the Port of Los Angeles at San Pedro Bay. The Free Harbor Fight was settled when San Pedro was endorsed in 1897 by a commission headed by Rear Admiral John C. Walker (who later went on to become the chair of the Isthmian Canal Commission in 1904). With U.S. government support, breakwater construction began in 1899, and the area was annexed to Los Angeles in 1909. The Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners was founded in 1907.

In 1912 the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its first major wharf at the port. During the 1920s, the port surpassed San Francisco as the West Coast's busiest seaport. In the early 1930s, a massive expansion of the port was undertaken with the construction of a breakwater three miles out and over two miles in length. In addition to the construction of this outer breakwater, an inner breakwater was built off Terminal Island with docks for seagoing ships and smaller docks built at Long Beach. It was this improved harbor that hosted the sailing events for the 1932 Summer Olympics.

Prior to the proliferation of refrigeration in the 1930s, canning was a significant industry in the port, preserving freshly caught fish for distribution to the rest of the country, and companies such as StarKist and the Van Camp Seafood Company were established along Tuna Street on Terminal Island to take advantage of the fishing community based there. Both fish and canning were grueling work, with fishermen often gone for weeks if not months at a time, and their wives working long hours at the cannery, attracting immigrant fishermen from Croatia, Japan, and Portugal.

Japanese-Americans began moving to the port around 1906, sought out by the canneries for their expertise in fishing and canning, and were offered subsidized housing to encourage them to move there, with some 3,000 Japanese-Americans living on Terminal Island in 1940. Everything changed following the attack on Pearl Harbor as nativist organizations used the attack to pressure the U.S. government to order the forced removal of American citizens of Japanese ancestry from coastal areas, and sent to camps far inland with only what they could carry, often forced to abandon or sell property at pennies on the dollar. Terminal Islanders, regardless of origin were especially hit hard as the government seized much of the land through eminent domain in order to ramp up shipbuilding for the war effort. Today, only a small memorial is all that is left of the once thriving fishing community that was based there.

During World War II, the port was primarily used for shipbuilding, employing more than 90,000 people. In 1959, Matson Navigation Company's Hawaiian Merchant delivered 20 containers to the port, beginning the port's shift to containerization. The opening of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in 1963 greatly improved access to Terminal Island and allowed increased traffic and further expansion of the port. In 1985, the port handled one million containers in a year for the first time. During the 2002 West Coast port labor lockout, the port had a large backlog of ships waiting to be unloaded at any given time. In 2000, the Pier 400 Dredging and Landfill Program, the largest such project in America, was completed. By 2013, more than half a million containers were moving through the Port every month.

Disruptions arising through the COVID-19 pandemic led to 109 container ships blocking the port during 2021-22, leading many shipping operators to look to other ports for docking.

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