California is a thriving and prosperous State with the adjacent Ports of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach sharing in this good fortune. The Port of Long Beach is just to the east of the Port of Los Angeles, and they are separate ports that tally their trade totals separately. California is a place of great beauty with the Foxen Canyon Wine Trail near Los Olivos and the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara to the west of Los Angeles as outstandingly beautiful areas. The offshore island of Santa Catalina is separated from Los Angeles by the San Pedro Channel, and giant tankers full of Alaskan crude oil or giant container ships weave their way through the offshore islands of Santa Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, San Clemente and the Anacapa Islands into these two big ports.

 Port Of San Pedro 

The Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and captain of a Spanish ship named the natural bay of San Pedro as the ‘Bahia de los Fumos’ or ‘Bay of Smokes’ due to the fires of the native Americans as he sailed by on 8th October 1542. Portugal and Spain then divided up the world into separate spheres of influence with the western half for Spain and the eastern half for Portugal. Thus, it was the Spanish in 1771 that first brought civilisation to the region by establishing a Mission at San Gabriel Arcangel, forty miles inland from San Pedro and another at San Juan Capistrano in 1777. The Mission monks decorated their churches with colourful tiles to remind them of their churches in Northern Spain. A smaller mission was founded in 1781 as the ‘Pueblo of our Lady the Queen of the angels’ at twenty miles distant from San Pedro. The monks were the first traders to use the muddy foreshore at San Pedro using ox carts filled with hides and tallow to exchange with Spanish ships calling twice a year with provisions from Spain.

Spanish speaking families arrived from the Mexican provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa to found a new town near San Pedro on 4th September 1781. American ships were not authorised to call due to Spanish trade restrictions and the first American ship Lelia Byrd arrived in 1805 under the command of Capt. William Shaler with a cargo of sugar, textiles and household goods somehow evaded the Spanish control. However, Mexico became independent from Spain in 1823, and San Pedro began to expand with American settlers heading west as Spanish trade restrictions were lifted.

The American flag went up at San Pedro in 1846, and California became a State within the Union of America in 1850, and a railway was built north from San Pedro to Los Angeles in 1869. This railtrack of length 21 miles was the first railroad in Southern California, and marked the beginning of a new era for the Port of San Pedro. The Main Channel was dredged to a depth of ten feet in 1871 and a breakwater was constructed between Rattlesnake Island (now Terminal Island) and Deadman’s Island. Some 50,000 tonnes of lumber, coal, hides and pelts moved through the port in 1871.

The port handled half a million tonnes of cargo in 1885 in the inner Harbour and outer Harbour, with San Pedro lumber docks an important port in 1888. In the same year of 1888 the Los angles Chamber of Commerce was founded and the entrance channel to San Pedro harbour was dredged to eighteen feet. On 1st March 1897, a decision was taken to concentrate port development at San Pedro rather than at Santa Monica or other places on the coast. Ten years later, in 1907, the Port of Los Angeles was officially founded with the creation of the Los Angeles Board of Harbour Commissioners.

Port Of Los Angeles 

Work on a long breakwater began at Point Fermin on the north side in 1899, and by 1912 it measured some 12,000 feet up to the angel’s gate Lighthouse. The Main Channel was then given an entrance of 2,200 feet, and work on another 12,500 feet middle breakwater was completed in 1937. This made the water area of the outer Harbour of the Port of Los Angeles one of the largest in the world. The entire United States Pacific Battle Fleet easily fitted into this big harbour, and some of the fleet was based here from 1907 until the end of World War II. at a later date, six thousand more feet of breakwater were added up to the adjacent harbour of the Port of Long Beach, with 1,800 feet for its entrance channel, and another 13,500 feet of breakwater to the east to make in total more than eight miles of breakwater for the two ports.

Matson Line to Hawaii and the Los Angeles Steam Ship Company to the Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia featured prominently on the front of the transit sheds of the Port of Los angles at the beginning of World War I. Pier ‘a’ was the City of Los Angeles Cruise Terminal for the wealthy leaving on Pacific and round the World cruises in 1920. Dollar Steamship Lines were an important customer of the Port of Los Angeles from 1926, with the twin funnelled liner President Hoover being dedicated at a wharf in a special ceremony in 1937. She was unfortunately lost by grounding on Taiwan on 11th December 1937. Toyo Kisen Kaisha had begun calling at the port in 1905, and the big liners of NYK and the round the World cruises of Empress of Canada (eastbound) and Franconia and Laconia (westbound) called in 1924. The three funnelled Empress of Britain of Canadian Pacific was a regular caller throughout the 1930s and was the largest passenger steamer to enter any west coast port. Other cruise liners called frequently such as the three funnelled Belgenland of Red Star Line, the three funnelled resolute of United American Line, and Empress of France of Canadian Pacific, and Cunard Line cruise ships such as Samaria and Carinthia.

This major port was, however, founded and grew up as an oil and shipbuilding port. Oil was first discovered in California in the mid 1870s in the Coalinga area of the San Joaquin valley, midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Frederick Taylor had prospected for oil for several years before his discovery, and in 1879 he set up the Pacific Coast oil Company. a refinery was built at alameda Point across San Francisco Bay to refine kerosene from the crude oil, which was transported along the coast in coastal tankers such as George Loomis of 900 dwt completed in 1896. after a bitter kerosene price war, Pacific Coast agreed to sell out to Standard oil of New Jersey in 1900, the latter having failed to buy Union oil Company (Unocal) of California. The financial strength of Standard allowed the building of a second refinery at San Francisco Bay at Point Richmond, and in 1906 the Standard merged the Pacific Coast oil Company and its mid-west Iowa Standard into the Standard oil Company of California (Socal) and built a third refinery at El Segundo near Los Angeles and using the Port of Los Angeles.

Union oil of California (Unocal) was founded in 1890 and launched its first tanker in 1903, and shortly afterwards converted a former dredger into the twin screw bulk oil tanker Oleum of 3,700 dwt. This company was under the control of the Stewart family during its early history, and as a tribute the first large deep sea tanker was named Lyman Stewart of 9,000 dwt when completed in 1914, with the similar Los Angeles and La Brea following in 1916. Three Unocal tankers of 12,000 dwt were built in 1921 at San Pedro by the Southwestern Shipbuilding Company in La Placentia, La Purisima and Montebello, with Unocal’s California wells producing three million tonnes of crude oil by 1930 and their tankers using the Port of Los Angeles. The general Petroleum Corporation, among others, needed facilities for the storage and shipment of oil and these were built in the 1920s.

During 1911/12, the Main Channel of the Port of Los Angeles was widened to eight hundred feet and dredged to a depth of thirty feet to accommodate the tankers and cargo ships that were using the port. The Southern Pacific railroad also completed their first wharf at this time in the port. On 15th august 1914, the Panama Canal opened and the location of the Port of Los Angeles gave it a unique and strategic advantage over west coast ports further north. As the nearest major American port west of the Panama Canal, the Port of Los Angeles became the natural port of call for most Trans Pacific shipping.

The 1920s was marked by a boom in the oil, shipbuilding, lumber, copra and citrus fruit industries of the port. In the peak year of 1928, the port handled 26.5 million tonnes of cargo, exceeding San Francisco as the west coast busiest port and established a cargo total that would stand as a record for the port for the next forty years. In 1936, the top import was lumber, and the top export was petroleum exports amounting to $35 million, with citrus fruit and aeroplane parts much lower than this figure. There were four shipbuilding yards at this time in the Port of Los Angeles, and another in the Port of Long Beach, and details of these yards are now given as their sites are now the bulk and break bulk quays and container terminals of the port:-

Todd Pacific Shipyards 

An emergency shipyard was set up in 1917 as Los Angeles Shipbuilding Company and stayed in business after the war in the 1920s, primarily as a ship repair yard but built no ships after 1930. The U.S. Navy invested $9 million in the facilities in 1941 but the yard never performed satisfactorily, and was requisitioned by the U.S. Navy in December, 1943 and turned over to Todd Pacific Shipyards to manage. At its peak, Todd Los Angeles employed 12,000 people building standard war construction ships, and was acquired by Todd Pacific Shipyards at the end of the war. Post war output included cruisers, frigates, minesweepers, deck barges as well as the cargo ships Mormaccape and Mormacglen of 12,700 dwt in 1960/61 and Washington Mail, Japan Mail and Philippine Mail of 20,200 dwt in 1962/63. The last ship delivered on 5th august 1989 was the frigate Ingraham.

California Shipbuilding Corporation (CALSHIP) 

The most famous ship built by this yard is now a museum ship and berthed underneath the massive Vincent Thomas Suspension Bridge at the Port of Los Angeles, the ‘victory’ type Lane victory, which can still steam. The site of the yard is now dry bulk Berths 212 and 213 of the port, but was originally one of the nine emergency yards built with eight slipways in 1940 for management by Todd and Kaiser for emergency war construction cargo ships with $27 million invested by the U.S. Maritime Commission (USMC). Kaiser gave way to Todd in 1942, and the slipways were increased in number to fourteen for the second wave of shipbuilding and employed 40,000 people. Calship built hundreds of ‘Liberty’ and ‘victory’ ships, but the yard was liquidated and cleared after the war. Council Bluffs victory was the last ship completed on 27th October 1945, and remarkably there are two examples of ‘victory’ ship afloat today from this yard. American victory is a museum ship at Tampa (Florida), and Lane victory remains proudly near her birth place in the Port of Los Angeles.

Southwestern Shipbuilding Company 

This yard was established by the Western Pipe and Steel Company in 1918 to build eighteen standard cargo ships with ‘West’ as a prefix to their names. The location flooded at high tide, and the port then pumped sand from the Main Channel to create an area of over forty acres protected from the seawater. It was leased after the war effort in 1921 to Bethlehem Steel as a ship repair yard and was then purchased by them in 1925. Many tankers were then built for the Union oil Company of California (Unocal), Dutch flag Shell (NITM), and the Luckenbach family. It was reactivated as a shipbuilding yard in 1940 and employed six thousand people, but reverted to ship repair after the war and was sold to Southwest Marine in 1981. The site of the yard is now Berth 240 of the Port of Los Angeles near the south western part of Terminal Island along Seaside Avenue. The present site comprises two separate areas, a mostly vacant area to the north and a paved area to the south, which is mainly occupied by World War II era buildings. A chain link fence encloses the entire yard with access through a large metal gate.

Consolidated Steel Corporation 

The steel corporation was formed in 1929 by the amalgamation of Llewellyn iron Works, Baker iron Works and Union iron Works. It immediately began shipbuilding at a leased yard in the Port of Long Beach, the former yard of John F. Craig, who moved to Long Beach from Toledo (Ohio) in 1907 with his 24 foremen and their families from a previous yard. Craig built ships at Long Beach until 1931, and the yard was reactivated for World War II construction on the west side of Channel Three of the inner Harbour of the Port of Long Beach. The Port of Los Angeles gained a new Consolidated Steel Corporation shipyard in 1940 with four berths using £13 million invested by the USMC. This yard employed seven thousand people and built hundreds of C1-B, C1-M-av1, and C2 standard cargo ships until 1946. The twin yards at the Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles were liquidated after the war, and the Port of Los Angeles Trans Pacific Container Terminal occupies the present site.

The sites of these redundant shipyards were redeveloped in post-war years as break bulk, and bulk quays, and container terminals. The top import of the Port of Los Angeles in 1957 was copra, and the top export was steel in a total port figure of 24.1 million short tonnes. The top trading partner of the port was Japan, but the first containers to arrive in the port came from Hawaii in august, 1958 into Berth 135 on the war standard Matson Line ship Hawaiian Merchant. A full Matson Line container service began in 1960 with seven thousand containers shipped that year. The high Vincent Thomas Suspension Bridge across the inner harbour was completed in 1963, and replaced the passenger ferry service across the Main Channel.

In 1982, the top import was oil and the top export was petroleum coke, and the biggest trading partner was Japan. The total cargo value of imports and exports was $9.4 billion and container handling amounted to 700,000 TEU. Seven major container terminals have since been built at the Port of Los Angeles. These are the China Shipping Container Terminal (Berths 100-109), Yang Ming Container Terminal (Berths 121-131), Trans Pacific Container Terminal (Berths 136-139), Port of Los Angeles Container Terminal (Berths 212-225), Evergreen Container Terminal (Berths 226-236), global gateway South Terminal (Berths 302-305), and the APM Maersk Line Terminal (Berths (401-406). The Port of Los Angeles became the biggest container port in the United States in 2000, a distinction it has held ever since. Container throughput at the Millennium was 4.9 million TEU, and growth since then has increased the figure to 6.1 million TEU in 2002, 7.3 million TEU in 2004, 8.5 million TEU in 2006, 9.0 million TEU in 2012 and today this figure is over ten million TEU.

The global gateway South Container Terminal opened in 1988 for use by American President Lines (APL) on a 232 acre site at a cost of $270 million and is equipped with a dozen gantry container cranes. The Port intermodal Container Transfer Facility to rail and road has been an important feature of this success since it opened in 1986. The top trading partner of the port is now China with trade valued at more than $350 billion with all manner of cargo shipped in containers including machine tools, furniture and paper products, and waste newspaper exported for recycling. The picturesque former Ferry Building across the Main Channel is now the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, from where free harbour cruises are provided on certain days of the year by the Port of Los Angeles. Harbour tugs owned by Crowley, Foss and the Pacific Tugboat Service dock and escort the deep sea ships in both the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach.

World Cruise Centre 

This major cruise terminal at the Port of Los Angeles is at Berths 91 to 93, i.e. three berths of total length of 2,850 feet, with a terminal area of eighteen acres and alongside water depth of 37 feet. The World Cruise Centre has two terminal buildings and three passenger processing areas with security clearance, baggage handling and passenger shuttles. Many major cruise lines call including Carnival Cruises, Celebrity Cruises, Crystal Cruises, Cunard Line, Disney Cruise Line, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line, royal Caribbean international, Seabourn Cruises and Silversea Cruises. All three berths are often in use on the same day by very large cruise ships of these lines.

Port Of Long Beach 

The present City of Long Beach, part of greater Los Angeles, was once the site of two very large ranches, Los Alamitos and Los Cerritos. The Long Beach Development Company purchased an area of marshland west of the city that was later to become the inner Harbour. The Port of Long Beach was founded on 24th June 1911 on 800 acres of mudflats and scrubland at the mouth of the Los Angeles River. The small steamer Iaqua offloaded some 280,000 square feet of redwood lumber in the harbour during June 1911 as the first ship in the port. The Los Angeles Dock and Terminal Company, which had begun to reclaim the 800 acres in 1907, declared itself bankrupt in 1916. The Long Beach Board of Harbour Commissioners was founded that year, and turned the huge project of harbour dredging over to the City of Long Beach.

The first Board of Harbour Commissioners met on 29th June 1917 with three commissioners present, the size of the Board increased to five commissioners in 1925 and has remained as such until the present time. Work on the Cerritos Channel to connect the Port of Long Beach with the Port of Los Angeles was completed in 1918 with a 200 feet wide channel, increased later to 300 feet wide. In 1924, Long Beach residents approved a $5 million bond issue for improvement of the inner Harbour as well as preliminary work on the outer Harbour. Pier one was reconstructed in 1928 and equipped with a new transit shed, and Piers A and B at the north of the inner Harbour were opened in 1931 for overseas traffic using the port income from one million tonnes of cargo traffic. Oil was discovered in the harbour in the 1930s and a forest of drilling towers sprang up after the first well proved economically viable. The first transit sheds on Piers A and B were completed before the start of World War II, and there was a total of over twenty small private wharves of various kinds.

The harbour became Long Beach Naval Base during the war, with as neighbours huge lumber yards and a total of 126 oil wells producing 17,000 barrels of crude oil per day and generating $10 million of oil revenue per annum. After the war, the first of nine transit sheds was completed on Pier F in 1946, and the oil revenues continued to be extensive for the next ten years. In 1956, oil revenues of over $120 million were paid to the State of California, with in future all natural gas revenue and half of the crude oil revenue to be paid to the State.

A new Port of Long Beach administration Building opened in 1960. Sea Land Container Services Inc began operations at Pier g in 1962, and construction of Piers F and J in the same eastern part of the harbour was begun three years later. a grand total of 3.35 million tonnes of rock and thirty million tonnes of infill created 310 extra acres in the eastern part of the Port of Long Beach for three new major container terminals in one of the largest landfill expansions in the world, if not the largest.

The three funnelled Cunard liner Queen Mary arrived to the east of the port in Queensway Bay on 9th December 1967 and berthed at her own special berth on Pier H. She had sailed from Southampton on 31st October after a 31 year Transatlantic and World War II career and had carried 2.112 million passengers and steamed 3.793 million miles. She carried one thousand passengers on her last voyage around Cape Horn, being too large for the Panama Canal, and her purchase price by the City of Long Beach was $3.45 million. She completed a conversion in May 1971 into a hotel and museum ship with her engines removed, and is still a big tourist attraction today nearly fifty years later.

The Gerald Desmond Harbour Bridge across the inner Harbour was opened in 1968 with four lanes of traffic and a 120 metre long suspended main span with 47 metres of vertical clearance over the water. Toyota began importing cars and vehicles at Pier J in 1971 and opened a 55 acre car yard behind the pier. International Transportation Services (ITS) opened a 52 acre container terminal at a cost of $10million on Pier J in 1972 using a 1,200 feet long wharf and two Paceco gantry cranes to service ships of customers such as ‘K’ Line and Zim Container Lines.

Sea Land Container Services inc. moved into an enlarged 80 acre container terminal on Pier g in 1973 with a fifteen acre rail and road facility beside it. The Pacific Container Terminal opened in 1974 on Pier J with a 34.5 acre facility at the southeast corner of the port. The adjoining Pier J basin expansion costing $50 million was completed in 1975 with ten berths and a dozen gantry container cranes. The new Maersk Line container ship Adrian Maersk of 2,092 TEU completed by Blohm & Voss at Hamburg began a service between Long Beach and Asian ports in 1975, and Maersk Line opened a 29 acre container terminal on Pier g in 1978. The break bulk quay on Pier E was converted from a general purpose wharf into a multi purpose ro-ro berth for California United Terminals at a cost of $20 million n 1978.

Hanjin Container Lines began services from Long Beach to Asian ports in 1979, and COSCO of China inaugurated container ship calls at the port in 1981 at the Pacific Container Terminal. On Piers g and J, double stack container trains were in operation in 1986, with Maersk Line expanding to 54 acres on Pier J. a large area of 88 acres on Pier F Long Beach Container Terminal was also in operation by 1986. During the 1980s, a Free Trade Zone and an international Container Transfer Facility was established, the latter at four miles distance from the port.

Toyota doubled its auto terminal to 144 acres in the north part of the inner Harbour in 1990. The former Procter & gamble plant on Pier C, built in the 1940s, was demolished to make way for a 57 acre container terminal for Hanjin Post Panamax container ships in 1993. The Maersk Line container terminal on Pier J was doubled in size to 107 acres with wharf piling given earthquake proof stress dispersal and damage reduction features. A coal storage yard was opened in 1994 by the Metropolitan Stevedoring Company at a cost of $20 million and it has a storage capacity of 170,000 tonnes of coal. The largest container terminal of 170 acres in Long Beach opened in 1997 for Hanjin at a cost of $277 million with six gantry cranes, a wharf of 3,600 feet and a nearby rail facility. Sea Launch, an international consortium led by Boeing and based at a quay on the outer Breakwater, sent off its first commercial satellite into orbit in 1999 from the equator using the launch ship Sea Launch Commander of 50,010 grt completed by the Fairfield yard on the Clyde in 1997.

Port container throughput then increased from 2.6 million TEU in 1995 to 4.4 million TEU in Millennium year, and the port celebrated its ninetieth anniversary in June 2001. In those ninety years, the grand visions of the pioneers of the port had been realised as the total area of the port was now over 7,600 acres thanks to massive reclamation projects. The Port of Long Beach was now one of the busiest ports in the world. Pier T in the West Basin began operations for Hanjin in 2002 on a 375 acre site with five thousand feet of wharf, fifty feet depth of water, capacity for 1,200 reefer container power plugs, and a dockside rail yard. The port also moved petroleum coke piles into sheds and began dust control measures to improve air quality in the surrounding residential communities. Container ships of 8,000 TEU routinely arrived in the port for COSCO of China and CSCL (China Shipping Container Line) from 2004.

The VLCC Alaskan Navigator, owned by the Alaska Tanker Company and one of four giant sisters that bring Alaskan crude oil into the port for BP at Pier T, was the subject of a ceremony as the first ship to be plugged into the first shoreside electrical grid in the world. A ceremony was held on 3rd June 2009 attended by Long Beach Port Executive Director Dick Steinke and Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster as well as senior management of BP Shipping. The project avoids the use of the vessel’s diesel engines in port and saves much energy and smoke in port, and cost $23.7 million and took three years to complete, with BP contributing $6 million to the project. The system required a series of steel pylons to be built across the port, which were then concreted into position at the Pier T without disruption to the normal flow of cargo into and out of the port.

When combined with the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach is the eighth busiest port in the world after Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shenzhen (China), Busan (South Korea), Ningbo (China) and Guangzhou (China). The Port of Long Beach covers a massive 3,600 acres and handles over six million TEU of containers per year with a cargo value of $180 billion. There are five thousand vessel calls per annum and one in eight of Long Beach residents work at the port. The port has eighty berths served by 66 Post Panamax gantry cranes at 22 Terminals (five break bulk for cars, lumber, steel, and iron ore, six bulk for petroleum bulk, salt, gypsum and cement, six container and five petroleum terminals). There are ten Piers in the port used by the following clients:-

Pier A – CMA CGM, MISC, ZIM Lines

Pier B – BP, Shell, Petro-Diamond, Toyota, National gypsum

Pier C – Matson Logistics, Forest Terminal

Pier D – OOCL in future

Pier E – Hyundai, California United Terminals

Pier F – OOCL, Container Terminal

Pier G – international Transport Services (ITS)

Pier H – Queen Mary, Cruise Terminal

Pier J – ‘K’ Line, COSCO, Pacific Container Terminal

Pier T – BP, Hanjin, COSCO, ‘K’ Line

Pier S on the Cerritos Channel is currently under development and has Dow Chemicals at one end; and in the Middle Harbour, the Lumber Quay is used by Weyerhauser, and the break bulk quay is used by both Coopers and T. Smith. The current top imports are crude oil, electronics, plastics, containers with manufactured items, furniture and clothing, and the top current exports are petroleum coke, oil in bulk and oil products, chemicals, and containers holding food, citrus and waste paper. The magnificent and big harbours of both the Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles will continue to grow in the coming years.

Postscript 

The City of angels (Los Angeles) has the eighth busiest port in the world on its doorstep, but it has a lot more to offer. A perpetually sunny climate and cloudless desert skies and snow capped mountains to the east together with dense forests, hidden waterfalls and pure alpine lakes just beyond the city limits. If one tires of driving the coastal Highway one (the Pacific Coast Highway) from Los Angeles to San Francisco via Carmel, one of the most beautiful and scenic drives in the whole world, or of Hollywood with its brashness, take the Santa Catalina Express ferry to Santa Catalina Island from the Port of Los Angeles. The small port of Avalon on the island, named after a magical island associated with King Arthur and Arthurian legend, has a restricted use of cars or vehicles, which is very pleasant and refreshing after the obsession with automobiles in Los Angeles. High on a hill with a view over the endless Pacific, sits a brick and adobe monument to the novelist Zane grey, who was also partly responsible for the large herd of buffalo that graze outside Avalon and which were left behind after a Western movie based on a Zane grey novel. Santa Catalina Island can also be reached by ferry from Long Beach City, and the towns of San Clemente and Laguna Beach to the east. The Port and City of the angels will not fail to delight the tourist or ship enthusiast.