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    The Port of Los Angeles
    The Port of Los Angeles
    The Port of Los Angeles
    Ebook165 pages58 minutes

    The Port of Los Angeles

    By Michael D White

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    About this ebook

    The epic of the Port of Los Angeles was initiated more than 150 years ago by a handful of visionaries and entrepreneurs who exploited both fortunate and outrageous circumstances to transform a tidal mudflat into the world's largest man-made harbor. Phineas Banning and archrival Augustus Timms were among the first to realize the potential of the coastal dent on the map called San Pedro Bay in the 1850s. The bay's namesake village expanded from a backwater loading point for raw cattle hides to a deepwater harbor rivaling and eventually surpassing San Francisco as the busiest port on the U.S. Pacific coast, and would later become the nation's largest container port. Political battles in far-off Washington, D.C., economic booms and depressions, world wars, and billions of tons of cargo and material later, the Port of Los Angeles remains America's premier revolving door for trade with markets around the world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439635964
    The Port of Los Angeles
    Author

    Michael D White

    Michael D. White is the author of three non-fiction books and more than nine hundred articles on international transportation and trade. He has studied international business in Japan and has traveled extensively in Asia. His editorial posts have ranged from reporter to managing editor for publications including Pacific Shipper, Brandon's Shipper & Forwarder, Traffic World, Los Angeles Business Journal, International Business Magazine, Pacific Traffic and Los Angeles Daily Commercial News & Shipping Guide.

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      Book preview

      The Port of Los Angeles - Michael D White

      project.

      INTRODUCTION

      Standing in the shadow of Warehouse No. 1 at the mouth of the port’s Main Channel, it would be very easy to conclude that the Port of Los Angeles, after all, really isn’t that busy.

      The occasional massive ship slowly glides up the waterway heading for her berth, the only sounds are the screeches of the gulls, the tooting of the attendant tugs, and the low, rhythmic hum of its diesel engines. In the distance, container cranes function, towering over their charges like giant birds feeding their young as, every now and then, a fuel barge or sailboat quietly, almost leisurely, passes.

      The mania that many associate with both success and the operations at other ports is uniformly absent, because the Port of Los Angeles is like no other port in the world.

      The sailing ships and lumber schooners that once tentatively connected the backwater mudflats of San Pedro with a much simpler world have, over the decades, given way to the giant car carriers, tankers, bulk carriers, and containerships that have turned the port into a revolving door for two-way trade moving between Southern California, the United States, and the entire world.

      Like Southern California itself, the port sprawls, covering more than 7,500 acres with 270 berths along 43 miles of waterfront.

      Once so shallow that visiting ships had to anchor in the harbor to have their cargo lightered to shore, the port is now the busiest container port in the entire United States and the eighth busiest in the world, handling millions of tons annually of import and export cargo, from furniture and auto parts to computer components and apparel.

      During one 21st-century year, more than 2,700 ships visited the port’s 27 specialized terminals, carrying containers filled with 182 million metric tons of dry and liquid bulk as well as break-bulk cargoes from more than 100 countries valued at more than $205 billion. More than a quarter-million imported automobiles and trucks were processed through the port’s auto facility, and 1.2 million passengers crossed the gangways of the World Cruise Center.

      Staggering statistics, these, but they are not the only storytelling points of any port, particularly the Port of Los Angeles. It’s a story written for future generations by the countless people who, from the beginning to today, invested themselves in developing the Port of Los Angeles into what it is today—pioneer entrepreneurs such as Phineas Banning and Augustus Timms, hard-fighting visionaries like Stephen White, dedicated guardians like Frank Higbee, and dynamic leaders like Geraldine Knatz.

      But it’s also the story of the sailors, the immigrant fishermen, the railroad workers, the longshoremen, the artisans and craftsmen, the engineers, the common laborers, and the countless, nameless others who, literally, put the Port of Los Angeles on the world map.

      The story is theirs and this book is for them.

      One

      THE AMAZING MR. BANNING

      For generations, the economy of the Spanish imperial backwater that was Southern California centered around the Mission San Gabriel, about 40 miles inland, and the ubiquitous cattle herds that covered the landscape providing the tallow and hides—known as California greenbacks—that formed the life’s blood of the region’s trade activity.

      In 1821, Spain ceded California to Mexico, and over the coming three decades, the hide and tallow trade flourished with regular visits by Yankee sailing ships to a lone hide house on the cliffs overlooking what is now the port’s Main Channel.

      Priced at $2 each, the stinking hides were processed and stacked into the ships’ fetid holds and carried back around Cape Horn to tanneries in New England, where they were transformed into boots, belts, shoes, and animal harnesses.

      In a story with a full cast of memorable characters, perhaps the most intriguing and compelling is Phineas Banning, the transplanted New Englander who arrived in San Pedro in 1851 at the age of 19, whose entrepreneurial vision and drive would later earn him the title Father of Los Angeles Harbor.

      Over the following 35 years, the hulking, largely self-educated Banning exercised a keen nose for business by spawning a series of ventures that would not only expand his own entrepreneurial horizons but also lay the foundation for the development of the harbor into a truly world-class port.

      Banning’s first venture was a local passenger and freight hauling network that eventually linked his wharf with points in five Western states.

      California state senator Phineas Banning introduced the first railroad bill in Sacramento in 1867 and later lobbied to have the U.S. Congress fund the first dredging of the harbor’s Main Channel and the construction of its first breakwater.

      In 1869, the transplanted Yankee oversaw the construction of a rail line linking the harbor at San Pedro and the burgeoning town of Los Angeles—a 21-mile stretch of track comprising the first railroad in Southern California.

      In 1885, the year Banning died, the port moved more than 50,000 tons of lumber, coal, manufactured goods, agricultural products, and other goods across the wharves he was largely responsible for building.

      HIDE HOUSE, 1823. San Pedro’s first warehouse

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