Review: David Alff on the Port of Los Angeles

LA’s port was an ambivalent achievement: a triumph of applied science, an ecological crime, a sublime public work promising collective uplift, and an occasion for greed, graft, and violence

On March 26, a Korean-built, Singapore-flagged, Danish-chartered, Indian- and Sri Lankan-crewed container ship struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The span collapsed, plunging eight road-maintenance workers into the Patapsco River. Of the eight men, who came from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, six died.

Debris blocked the channel, shutting down most of Baltimore’s marine terminals and diverting inbound vessels to Savannah, Norfolk, Philadelphia, and Bayonne. Motorists detoured off the Key into the Harbor and Fort McHenry tunnels or piled onto passenger trains. The collision caused logistical havoc for Baltimoreans and a “global crisis” for everyone who relied on their port—a local tragedy entwining four continents. 

A harbor is one place that implicates others: a patch of sheltered water and everything it links. James Tejani makes this point with eloquence and rigor in his new history of the Port of Los Angeles. Just as the destruction of Baltimore’s Key Bridge echoed across oceans, the nineteenth-century conversion of California’s San Pedro Estuary into America’s chief Pacific gateway stretched “across the continent to the Apacheria, to Washington, to New York, and to Civil War Richmond; overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia; and back again.”

Tejani presents LA’s port as an ambivalent achievement: a triumph of applied science, an ecological crime, a sublime public work promising collective uplift, and an occasion for greed, graft, and violence. His story picks up in the early 1800s, when members of the fledgling US Coastal Survey employed geodetic triangulation to plot California’s coast, and thereby “correct falsity” in existing maps and “dispel fates threatened by the untamed Pacific.”

Surveyors eventually mapped the shoreline, but no trigonometric reckoning could contain the human chaos that ensued. A gold rush catalyzed the settlement and statehood of California. Southern secession scrambled alliances in a volatile West populated by Unionists, Confederates, and indigenous people who had been colonized by Spanish missionaries, then forcibly assimilated by Mexican ranchers. A collage of overlapping land claims confounded civic endeavor. Railroads muscled their way to the water. Victory in the Spanish-American War pushed U.S. empire toward the South Pacific.

This cyclone of territorial conflicts and mercantile ambitions resolved only in the twentieth century, when the City of Los Angeles grew powerful enough to reserve its estuary for oceanic traffic, and dredging machinery improved to the point that engineers could carve a navigable channel through its scarcely submerged mud flats. As Tejani tells it, the finished port marks a political and technological threshold at which the contemporary American Southwest comes into view. San Pedro is both the book’s subject and a receding point that draws together events far beyond.

This dockside view of US history offers many rewards. These include a unique vantage on the American Civil War, which proceeded in California not as a strictly latitudinal conflict between North and South but the scattershot pattern of sieges and skirmishes that Megan Kate Nelson details in her Pulitzer-Prize nominated 2020 history, The Three-Cornered War. Tejani deftly salvages from archives the interpersonal dramas of those involved: Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman all had a surprising hand in remaking San Pedro.

Tejani sometimes strays too far inland, dwelling on events in Arizona, New Mexico, and San Francisco to which the port feels incidental. At points, the cast of characters grows so unwieldy that one has to thumb back and forth to the index to disentangle who allied with whom to what ends. The story loses grit and momentum as its focus dilates.

Trimming this interior material may have freed space for Tejani to address more recent developments. The making of LA’s port is, according to this book, mostly a nineteenth-century story. Although an evocative coda touches on late 1900s and 2000s, I would have loved to hear more about the shipping container revolution, maritime California’s role in World War II, and the conditions that led economists to describe San Pedro as among the “least efficient” ports in the world, a COVID-era supply-chain bottleneck that made many Americans take notice of the shipping world that carries “90 percent of everything” in Rose George’s evocative phrase.

This might be unfair to ask of a historian who specializes in the decades between the Civil War and Great Depression, though the book’s sweeping title (which lacks delimiting dates) and commercial imprint seem to offer such promise. It’s Tejani’s great success at depicting the San Pedro estuary’s topographical evolution that seems to push his narrative current toward the present, and into conversation with recent studies of the port like Christina Dunbar-Hester’s Oil Beach. One representative interlude is his account of shipping entrepreneur Phineas Banning, who in 1858 tricked onlookers into believing that San Pedro was a viable harbor by loading a ship with empty boxes so that it would clear the bay’s protruding sand bars—a deceitful performance that seems all the more ridiculous given the vast scale of LA’s deep water port today.

Tejani’s brightest prose appears in episodic chapters tracking San Pedro’s environmental deterioration. The making of a port is the unmaking of a biome for “small fish, mollusks, echinoderms, and crustaceans. The shallows, those with eelgrass especially, offered safety to eggs and juveniles.” The movement of freight presumes the displacement of people. Although relics of the region’s original Gabrielino-Tongva residents have “mixed with sand and sediment to form the concrete foundations of a city and its harbor” the earth sometimes “threw back fishhooks of shell and bone, stone weights once used for nets, partially worked scallop and abalone, and the remains of hunted birds, deer, rabbit, whales, and otter” in the course of the harbor’s construction.

The counternarratives Tejani lays out, of lands and societies collateralized to advance a clutch of commercial interests under the banner of democratic progress, remind us that today’s southern California is not a culmination of history but one more tidal wash in an ongoing story of push and pull. His account of places, people, and movements asks, “What is the relationship today between democratic promise and material promise?” This is a question we should ask not only of the Port of Los Angeles but of all promissory endeavor called infrastructure.

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David Alff teaches in the English Department at SUNY-Buffalo. His most recent book is The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region. He has written about quarantine, parking, and animal crossing for Book Post. We also talked about Dave’s work on infrastructure in a Book Post Notebook about libraries and universal wifi.

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