by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This afternoon, James Tejani, associate professor of history at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, gave a very interesting and informative presentation on the Port of Los Angeles based on his new book, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America, which uses a map from the Homestead’s collection as an illustration.
Professor Tejani tailored his talk to the setting, as he noted that the Homestead lies within the essential Alameda Corridor East (ACE) system, in which goods arriving for foreign locales are shipped north from the port (roughly along Alameda Avenue) and then east along rail lines and freeways, with State Route 60 being about a mile to the south and the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific tracks being just 1,500 and 500 feet away, to the north and south, respectively.
He focused his remarks on several major figures associated with the early development of the harbor, including George Davidson of the United States Coast Survey, whose 1850s mapping of the port area and elsewhere along the Pacific Coast was vital to future development; Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War (now, Defense) from 1853-1857, who promoted a transcontinental route to the Pacific from his native South—Davis was the president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War; ranchero Manuel Domínguez, whose Rancho San Pedro included the coastal area where the port was developed; and Edward O.C. Ord, who conducted the first survey in Los Angeles in 1849, but, the same year, created a railroad survey map that influenced Davis and who, ironically, participated as a Union Army general in the close of the Civil War that defeated the Confederacy.
Professor Tejani deftly married a potentially challenging topic of mapping and surveying with the geopolitical realities of antebellum America leading to the Civil War, while also providing notable perspectives on regional developments in a Los Angeles that, thanks to the significant investments at the harbor, grew in staggering proportion with no small thanks to the immense improvements at the port.
Following from today’s stimulating discussion, this post looks at another object from our holdings, a 1921 booklet published by the Board of Harbor Commissioners called “Los Angeles: The Great Seaport of the Southwest,” and which gives some important information about the harbor and region as greater Los Angeles was amid yet another of its many boom periods.
In a preface, it was stated that
In issuing this booklet, the Board of Harbor Commissioners has endeavored to place before the general public, in an intelligble, concise, and graphic way, the main features of interest and importance connected with Los Angeles Harbor . . .
The Board of Harbor Commissioners indulges the hope that study of the following pages will aid in disseminating information concerning the harbor, and in creating a more lively interest in affairs of the Port.
It is hard to overestimate the vital importance the harbor has on the economy of greater Los Angeles and the American Southwest and, as Prof. Tejani discussed, the remarkable human transformation of a site that was not naturally fitted for such a use is a story that is reflective of our region broadly, the carving out and creating of a metropolitan region that generally belies its geological conditions.
Posts on this blog have shared some of this history with respect to the fact that the harbor, originally at San Pedro on the shore of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, was so unsuited to normal commerce that ships had to anchor offshore a considerable distance and rely on small craft to carry freight and passengers back and forth.
In the early 1870s, the first federal appropriations were made for improvement at what also included “Port Admiral” Phineas Banning’s New San Pedro, or Wilmington, but it was the “Free Harbor Fight” in a contest between the growing port and the powerful Southern Pacific’s Santa Monica project that set the incredible pace of change at the Port of Los Angeles that has continued ever since.
When this publication was issued, the Panama Canal, now the subject of contention with the incoming presidential administration and that Central American nation, was seven years old and its completion, obviously, had enormous implications for the Port and its development. Los Angeles, with aggressive annexation, marketing by the Chamber of Commerce, waves of booms that brought hordes of new residents and workers, and industrial expansion, among other elements, burgeoned from a city of about 575,000 in 1920 to over 1.2 million a decade later.
The context, then, for the creation of the booklet is an important one, though this was not discussed in it. Instead, it relied on nearly 70 photos and fifteen pages of general information and data to give readers a comprehensive factual view of the expanding harbor, though this material certainly conveys the dramatic changes occurring in recent years and hinted at the short-term future of the port.
The photos include some early aerial views along with standard ground-level shots of warehouses; sheds; loading of ships; passenger and ferry landings; oil refineries and wharves (1921 was a crucial year for enormous expansion of oil production in greater Los Angeles, including at Huntington Beach, Long Beach and Santa Fe Springs most particularly); shipyards; lumberyards; and more.
A centerfold map shows the Port and nearly forty steamship lines operating in it and radiating to locations worldwide, with, not surprisingly, the vast majority of them utilizing the Panama Canal to reach destinations to the east. A laid-in map shows “Los Angeles Harbor and Vicinity” and complements the aerial photos showing the scale and scope of what, a half century before, was a very modest and humble little port generating a tiny fraction of the business that was being handled at the start of the Roaring Twenties.
The information section offered the usual claim that “what is now the Port of Los Angeles was discovered in 1542,” though the indigenous people would offer another interpretation, while it was added that “present harbor lines were established by the War Department in 1908,” another critical element with the establishment of the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy as a bigger presence in the harbor area (not to mention San Diego). The following year involved the annexation to Los Angeles, through the notorious “shoestring” addition, of the towns of San Pedro and Wilmington.
Also vital was the amount of money expended by municipal and federal allocations, totaling nearly $8 million on waterfront work and another $7 million in general improvements by the former and $6 million on dredging, breakwater and jetty projects, with another $1 million for upcoming efforts, by the latter.
Information on the federal government breakwater; wharves and piers; transit sheds and warehouses; oil loading facilities; railroads; fishing (this based largely at Terminal Island, where many Japanese and others plied their trade); lumber; shipbuilding (this boosted by the late world war); tidelands; pilotage; stevedoring; dockage and wharfage fees; and other aspects are also provided, with most of this information generally technical. A table of the steamship companies is also included.
As to some of the data, it was noted that lumber imported was, of course, impacted by the war and a resulting financial recession, with board feet totals dropping by about a quarter, though the values rose. A dramatic rebound took place in 1920 with increases of more than a third in board feet and more than 70% in value from the prior year, though there was a small decline for 1921 of 589 million board feet and to just over $20 million in value.
General commercial figures, though, showed an increase, even during the war from 1916, though, again, there was a significant burgeoning in 1920 and 1921. So, the conflict’s end involved about 2.4 million tons and $86.5 million in value, but, the 1921 figures were 4.3 million and $188 million, respectively. Also of note is a table of revenues and disbursements for the previous four years, so that the numbers were $250,000 and $165,000 for the 1917-1918 fiscal year and close to $400,000 and $300,000 for the 1920-1921 period.
A section headed “General Information Regarding Los Angeles: The Metropolis of the Southwest” gives a good deal of typical material to demonstrate the remarkable success of the developing city as well as demonstrate low costs for such essentials as electricity and water for residential and industrial customers of the powerful Department of Water and Power. The assessed valuation of the city was pegged at $636 million and about double for the county.
There were 25 banks, 350 churches, 90 motion picture theaters and 53 production companies, 29 other theaters and 1,132 school buildings, with 4,300 teachers and 142,000 students, along with 144 private schools and colleges. The city’s public library, involving 12 branches and 27 sub-branches through the sprawling metropolis, had some 410,000 volumes, a home circulation of about 3 million and 150 deposit stations. There were 25 parks comprising 4,100 acres, though over 70% of that was within Griffith Park, the country’s second largest city park.
It was claimed that the Angel City boasted the “best hotel accommodations in the country” with the facility for housing some 150,000 persons. The region, it was asserted, also offered “the best electric [streetcar] system, urban and interurban, in the world,” with a reach of up to 70 or so miles and 591 miles of city and nearly 1,100 miles of suburban trackage employing more than 7,200 persons. Six transcontinental steam railroad lines traveled in and out of the area, with another 10,000 persons working locally for them.
As for manufacturing it was stated that there were more than 3,000 of all types and a workforce of over 102,000. The value of industrial products in 1900 was just north of $15 million, but this ballooned for more than $68 million under a decade later, to above $103 million when the First World War burst forth in 1914 and an estimated $619 million as the Roaring Twenties made its debut when this publication was issued.
A couple of other broad Angel City infrastructure components that were cited included the existence of 150,000 telephone stations, which “is equivalent to about one telephone for every four men, women and children in the city, or one for almost every family, placing Los Angeles, in this respect, far ahead of all other cities in the world.” Today, it seems as if every person in the metropolis has a cell phone!
As for fire protection, there were a variety of vehicles employed by the city department, totaling nearly seventy, including seven horse-drawn pump engines, though that would soon cease. Full-time firefighters numbered 786 and there were 6,700 hydrants and 423 alarm boxes in use. Notably, nothing was said about the Los Angeles Police Department.
The exports of Los Angeles goods to foreign countries leapt dramatically in recent years, though the first figure from 1912 of $235,460 may be missing a number. In any case, in 1917 the total was just over $3 million and then pushing $10.5 million two years later and climbing to close to $20 million in 1920. With respect to imports, this, too, grew, but not as intensely. The 1912 figure was a little north of $2.7, reaching almost $3.5 million in five years, though declining slightly by 1919, almost certainly due to the war. In 1920, however, the figure more than doubled to a bit higher than $7 million.
A pair of tables are also useful in seeing the power of the regional economy in the early Twenties. From 1885 to 1920, business of the post office rose incredibly, starting with just $47,000 and doubling by 1890 and then a further 250% increase by the end of the 19th century. That figure was at $260,000, but after the first decade of the new century, the figure was at almost $1,500,000. In 1920, the total stood at nearly $4.2 million.
Similarly situated were bank clearings, which in 1890 totaled $36 million and, in ten years, nearly quadrupled. In 1910, the figure was well north of $800 million and almost another tripling was realized at the end of the decade. In 1920, the amount was just shy of $4 billion, another reflection of the swiftness of growth in Los Angeles financial circles mirroring that of other aspects of the transformation of the Angel City.
Agriculture was long the backbone of the regional economy and, while this would soon be overtaken by heavy manufacturing, the motion picture industry, and oil production, the figures were still quite impressive in 1921. The orange, a symbol of our region to outsiders for decades, had nearly 20% of the total value of just over $320 million, with hay and alfalfa each generating a little over 10%. Other crops of significance included canned fruits and vegetables ($18 million), sugar ($17.3 million), table grapes ($14.4 million), poultry ($14 million), cotton ($12.1 million) and lemons (almost $11 million.)
For those interested in Professor Tejani’s book, copies are available at the Homestead Store, as well as at bookstores and online outlets including those identified on the website of the publisher, W.W. Norton.