The Port of Los Angeles

Almost none of what you are looking at is natural. The inner harbor was sloughs and salt marsh, dredged out at the turn of the twentieth century. Terminal Island was a marshy spit reshaped by decades of dredging. Pier 400, finished in the late 1990s, is a landmass of its own: twenty-nine million cubic yards of dredged material held behind rock dikes to make roughly six hundred acres that did not exist before. The harbor is not a place that was found. It is a thing that was built, and it is still being built.

It works. This is the busiest container port in the United States, moving cargo in twenty-foot equivalent units by the millions each year, across a complex of roughly seven thousand five hundred acres and dozens of terminals. Add the adjacent Port of Long Beach and San Pedro Bay handles a large share of everything that enters the country by sea.

The Vincent Thomas Bridge, opened in 1963, is the green suspension span over the main channel, and it went up because containerization was arriving and the cargo needed a road to Terminal Island and the rail yards beyond.

Go to the Downtown Harbor in San Pedro. The Maritime Museum sits in the 1941 municipal ferry terminal, the battleship Iowa is berthed nearby, and the port runs free narrated harbor boat tours through the working channels.