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San Pedro is home to the port of Los Angeles. Rather pretentiously named
“Worldport LA,” the port complex occupies the west half of a man-made
harbor on San Pedro Bay. Combined with the adjacent Port of Long Beach,
it’s the largest and busiest harbor in the United States and the fifth
busiest in the world. Fishing originally was San Pedro’s dominant
industry, but freighters and cruise ships have completely displaced the
commercial fishing fleet.
San Pedro was not named for the familiar Saint Peter who guards
Heaven’s pearly gates. The Tongva people greeted the Spanish explorer
Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo when he “discovered” San Pedro Bay in 1542.
Noticing that smoke from Tongva fires accumulated under what is now
called an “inversion layer,” Cabrillo named it Bahia de los
Fumos, the Bay of Smokes. This was surely the first recorded
reference to Los Angeles smog! On 26 November 1602, Sebastian
Vizcaíno arrived at the Bay of Smokes during his expedition to
map the California coast. Following his pious practice, he renamed the
bay Ensenada de San Andreas after the Apostle Andrew, the saint
corresponding to that day on the Catholic calendar. In 1734, the
navigator and cartographer José Gonzáles Cabrera Bueno
discovered that Vizcaíno had misread the calendar. The saint for
26 November actually is Peter of Alexandria, a fourth-century archbishop
martyred during one of the periodic Roman persecutions of Christians.
The bay thus received its final name of San Pedro. You’ll survive a
shibboleth challenge if you pronounce it “San Pee-dro” as locals
do.
Many people are surprised to learn that San Pedro is part of the City of
Los Angeles. It’s on the southern end of the
Palos Verdes Peninsula, 30 kilometers away
from downtown Los Angeles and seemingly disconnected from the rest of
the city. Los Angeles in the early 20th century was something like
Star Trek’s
Borg, relentlessly “annexing” numerous nearby cities
and towns. In 1906, Los Angeles officials decided the city should have a
port. So they started by annexing a narrow corridor (less than a
kilometer wide in some places) that extends 25 kilometers to San Pedro
Bay. That was merely a prelude to annexing San Pedro itself— and for
good measure, the town of Wilmington at the north end of the harbor— in
1909. The corridor is officially called “Harbor Gateway” and
unofficially called “the strip.” Residents of “the strip” often are
barely aware that they live in Los Angeles, since they get police, fire,
and mail service (and their Zip code) from the nearest adjacent city.
Most of the harbor’s 69 kilometers of waterfront are private shipping
terminals dedicated to container ships, oil tankers, dry bulk goods
(such as coal or steel), and other specialized cargo. They’re all leased
from the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners and closed to the
public. Sections open to visitors include a yacht marina (also the home
port of a vestigial sport fishing fleet) and Ports O’ Call Village. The
latter is a “themed” shopping mall made up to resemble a New England
fishing village, with eateries, fish markets, and tourist tchotchke
shops. Harbor cruises that leave from Ports O’ Call Village offer the
only readily accessible close-up look at the port. It’s best to take a
harbor cruise in the late afternoon, since most of the interesting port
machinery is on the east side of the harbor’s main channel.
Container ships are Worldport LA’s the most prominent (and colorful)
traffic. Steel shipping containers in internationally-standardized sizes
are key elements of the infrastructure that makes the Global Economy
possible.
A factory in China can fill a container with boxes of lead-painted toys
or adulterated toothpaste and load it onto a train bound for the port of
Shanghai. There it’s loaded onto a container freighter. When the
ship arrives at San Pedro, cranes at the terminal load the container
onto a truck bound for a local warehouse, where the container is opened
in preparation for distributing the goods to unsuspecting consumers on
the West Coast. Or perhaps they’ll load it onto a train bound for
somewhere on the East Coast, then onto a truck that takes it to the
warehouse. The fancy term for this process is intermodal
transportation. A severe trade imbalance means that most containers go
back to China empty. Sometimes they’re abandoned at ports because
new containers cost less than sending them back for reuse.
The containers are eight feet (2.44 meters) wide, eight and a half feet
(2.59 meters) high; and 20 feet (6.1 meters) or 40 feet (12.2 meters)
long. A 40-foot container— the most common size— can hold
just under 27 tonnes of cargo. The international standard for shipping
containers is (perhaps uniquely) based on English units rather than
metric, since American companies originated the standards. By the time
the rest of the world decided to adopt an international standard, the
American sizes were too firmly entrenched to change. Perhaps the most
interesting thing about shipping containers is that they’re
painted in colors so bright and intense that the Web versions of these
pictures (and most monitors) can’t reproduce them correctly.
San Pedro’s newest and largest container terminals are on Terminal
Island, a man-made island built from a former mud flat in the center of
the harbor. Although the name is certainly appropriate, it predates
today’s container terminals by nearly a century. The Los Angeles Terminal
Railroad Company bought what was then called Rattlesnake Island in 1871
to build a railroad terminal (as in “the end of the line”)
for the burgeoning port. Understandably, the name didn’t seem
fitting for an important rail terminal, so the company renamed the
island after itself. Reservation Point, a peninsula on the southwest tip
of Terminal Island, is a federal enclave with a Coast Guard station and
a low-security men’s prison.
The cranes at the terminals are as colorful as the containers they lift
on and off the ships. They’re often called portainers, although
strictly speaking that’s a trademarked name for one kind of container
crane. The 21st century longshoreman sits in a cab at the top of the
crane and maneuvers a “spreader” along a rail until it’s over the ship.
Then he or she lowers the spreader until it locks onto a container,
engages a pulley to lift it, and sends the whole assembly down the rail
to the dock. A fully-loaded 40-foot container can weigh over 30 tonnes—
the equivalent of four bull elephants plus a cow elephant.
The Vincent Thomas Bridge crosses the harbor between San Pedro and
Terminal Island. It resembles San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge, although it’s
shorter and painted green rather than red. Named for a long-time member
of the California Legislature who tirelessly campaigned for its
construction, it carries a lot of truck traffic from the port. It also
provides a scenic route from the 110 (Harbor) Freeway to downtown Long
Beach. This suspension bridge once offered pedestrians a great view of
the harbor. But like its San Francisco sibling, it was also irresistible
to suicide jumpers. To stop the costly disruption suicides caused to
port traffic, authorities banned all pedestrians and put a 6-meter-high
mesh fence along both sides of the bridge. So unless you’re caught in a
traffic jam, you can only enjoy a brief sample of the view.
Of course there is more to San Pedro than the port. Point Fermin Park
covers fifteen hectares on a cliff 30 meters above a rocky shoreline.
You can have a picnic while watching the ships entering and leaving the
harbor, or enjoy the view of “The Hill” that dominates the Palos Verdes
Peninsula. When you’re done, you can walk down one of the trails to the
ocean. Captain George Vancouver named Point Fermin in 1793 for Fermin
Francisco de Lasuen, president of the California missions.
The Point Fermin Lighthouse is the park’s centerpiece. Both a
lighthouse and a proper Victorian home for its keeper, it first lit up
on 15 December 1874. The first keepers were two “spinster
sisters” who quit after eight years because the lighthouse was too
isolated. The original lamp burned whale oil, but a petroleum vapor lamp
replaced it in 1898, followed in 1925 by a modern electric light that
could be seen for 35 kilometers. The lighthouse was decommissioned in
1941, when the government shut down all lighthouses during the war. It
fell into decay until volunteers restored it for its centennial in 1974.
It then served as the park superintendent’s residence until 2002,
when a two-year extensive renovation began. Today the lighthouse is a
museum open for guided tours.
Overlooking Point Fermin is Angel’s Gate Park, home of a colorful
monument that guidebooks often ignore. Dedicated in 1976, the
Korean Friendship Bell and Pavilion is a gift from the Republic of
(South) Korea. It celebrates the United States Bicentennial and the
friendship between the two countries, and honors veterans of the Korean
Conflict.
Carved with four pairs of figures, the bell is modeled on an 8th century Korean bronze original. It’s 3.7 meters high, 2.3 meters across, and weighs 18.7 tonnes. Dignitaries fly in from Korea to ring it with a painted wooden log only three times each year, on 4 July (U.S. Independence Day), 15 August (South Korean Independence Day), and New Year’s Eve. A locked iron chain on the log secures the bell against unauthorized ringing.
I found the stone pavilion that houses the bell more interesting than
the bell itself. Thirty craftsman brought in from Korea worked for ten
months to build it. Twelve red columns (representing the zodiac) support
a pagoda-style roof from which the bell hangs. The wooden ceiling sports
an array of colorful, intricate carvings, patterns, and painted dragons.
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