Southern California’s economic boom of the 1880s (see Chapter 7) gave rise to Los Angeles’ bid in the 1890s for federal aid to build a harbor and breakwater to accommodate the anticipated growth of Pacific maritime trade. Though San Diego had the best natural harbor in southern California, that city did not have the lobbying clout in Sacramento and the nation’s capital to compete for funds with such rivals to the north as Santa Monica and San Pedro. Each of these two rival sites in the vicinity of Los Angeles had powerful advocates.
Phineas Banning (see Pacific Profile below), an entrepreneurial-minded resident of the coastal town of Wilmington, took the initiative and began the lengthy process of transforming San Pedro into a world-class port. In the 1850s Banning built a San Pedro wharf atop a rock jetty, foreseeing great profits in facilitating Los Angeles’ ocean-going commerce. Between 1870 and 1890 he helped secure federal assistance to improve San Pedro’s inner harbor and build its first breakwater to shield the port from Pacific swells. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1888, overcame its uneasiness about involving the federal government and invited Washington, D. C., officials on fact-finding junkets to San Pedro. As a result, in 1890 the Corps of Engineers studied several sites for harbor construction, selecting San Pedro and recommending an outlay of $4 million to build a breakwater.
Collis P. Huntington, however, worked mightily to steer Congress away from San Pedro and toward Santa Monica, where the Southern Pacific had bought waterfront property that would give his company a monopoly on rail traffic to and from Los Angeles. Huntington had powerful friends in Congress, especially Senator William P. Frye of Maine, chair of the Committee on Commerce. Frye mocked the San Pedro harbor proposal, criticizing its advocates for “calling on the government to give you what nature refused.” Dissatisfied with the results of the earlier Corps of Engineers study, in 1892 Huntington persuaded Congress and the administration to conduct a second study. Again, the Corps recommended San Pedro. Ignoring the finding, Huntington designated the world’s longest wharf, constructed by the railroad at Santa Monica, as Port Los Angeles. The secretary of the treasury extended Customs District certification, authorizing Port Los Angeles to participate in international trade. In its first 18 months of operation, Port Los Angeles berthed some 300 ships. San Pedro registered a consequent loss in business.
Alarmed by Huntington’s boundless determination to push for a harbor site at Santa Monica, supporters of a San Pedro port were galvanized into action. For example, the Los Angeles Free Harbor League formed. The term “Free,” in this instance, meant that the Southern Pacific would not dominate the prospective port, which would be open to virtually all trading and transport enterprises. Los Angeles newspapers, particularly the Times, gave editorial support to San Pedro. On the East Coast, the New York World asked whether this was “a government for the people, or a government by Mr. Huntington, for Mr. Huntington.” The Santa Fe Railroad notified Washington, D. C., officials that its $500 million investment would be lost if the federal government financed improvements to the Southern Pacific’s Santa Monica harbor.
In the face of increasing opposition (even his fellow Associate, Stanford, favored San Pedro), Huntington persisted, bringing his clout to bear on Washington, D. C., legislators. As a result, a congressional committee deliberating on the 1896 Rivers and Harbors Bill approved the measure’s $2.9 million appropriation for construction of a breakwater at Santa Monica.
But for the doggedness and oratorical brilliance of California Senator Stephen M. White, immortalized in a 1908 bronze statue placed in the heart of the City of Angels, San Pedro might have lost its bid to be Los Angeles’ harbor. White effectively debated Frye on harbor location, with the result that another (third) commission, composed of engineers, was tasked with deciding whether the $2.9 million appropriation should be spent at Santa Monica or San Pedro. The commission’s choice of San Pedro must have galled Huntington, for he had been instrumental in securing the sum from Congress in the first place.
In April 1899 the first rocks splashed from a barge, settling into San Pedro Bay. Construction of the long-awaited breakwater had begun. Born of a clash between political titans, the Los Angeles-San Pedro harbor, when joined with that of Long Beach, would one day become the largest and busiest port complex in the United States.
Pacific Profile: Phineas Banning, Port of Los Angeles and Santa Catalina Promoter
“A massive frame, dynamic in action, a keen brain, violent passions, and an abundant heart” - these were the words used by a contemporary to describe Phineas Banning (1830-85). Banning played a critical role in southern California’s maritime development, including that of Santa Catalina Island. His meteoric rise as an entrepreneur during the latter half of the nineteenth century both promoted and reflected the growth of Los Angeles itself.
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, into a large, struggling family, young Banning made his way to southern California by ship via the Isthmus of Panama route, arriving in San Pedro in 1851. Taking on business partner David Alexander, Banning opened a stagecoach line to Los Angeles, roughly 20 miles distant from San Pedro. Soon the two partners had warehouses, 15 wagons, and 75 mules to facilitate their freight-hauling business. Their wagon service eventually connected San Pedro to such faraway points as Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Banning’s inland ventures were complemented and eclipsed by his Pacific operations. Realizing that Los Angeles’ growth was closely tied to maritime trade, he built two San Pedro wharves in the early 1850s, the first having been destroyed by storms. Within a few years he founded the seacoast town of Wilmington (where he lived and which he named after his hometown), had vessels built in San Francisco to carry passengers and baggage from offshore steamships to his new beach resort on Santa Catalina, and inaugurated a shipping service between San Pedro, San Francisco, and San Diego. In 1857, for example, he shipped 21,000 crates of wine grapes to San Francisco. Banning had become so identified with seagoing traffic that throughout Los Angeles he was known as “Port Admiral.” All of
Banning’s various shipping and transportation ventures just mentioned - plus lumbering and stevedoring - eventually came under the umbrella of his Wilmington Transportation Company.
In the early 1860s the state awarded the Port Admiral a franchise to build a railroad from Wilmington to Los Angeles. State, county, and city funding measures financed the rail line, which was completed in 1869. In the following decade the Southern Pacific bought it and made Banning an officer of the corporation. Meanwhile, he secured federal funding for a lighthouse and improvements for the harbor at Wilmington-San Pedro.
Besides championing a harbor for Los Angeles, Banning’s other major maritime project was promoting the development of Santa Catalina, one of California’s Channel Islands located 22 miles from San Pedro. Beginning in 1859 he organized visits to Santa Catalina for friends and business associates. Convinced of the island’s resort and mining possibilities, he tried to purchase it with a partner in 1883. Before a sale could be completed, Banning suffered severe injury when he stepped off a trolley in San Francisco and was struck by a passing express wagon. He lived only a few years afterward until declining health took him to an early grave. Banning’s three sons, who had often vacationed on Santa Catalina while growing up, bought nearly the entire island in 1892, developing its resort facilities and infrastructure while providing a steamer service to and from its anchorage at Avalon.
Eventually a Los Angeles street was named after the Port Admiral, as well as a town in southern California, and a high school in Wilmington. His greatest contribution to the Golden State, however, was his initiation of the San Pedro-Los Angeles Port project.
Figure 8.1 Rocks quarried on Santa Catalina Island and used to construct the Los Angeles-San Pedro breakwater. Photo: T. F. Keaveney. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Harbor Department.
World History
