Rising from mudflats to world-class cargo hub, the ports of L.A. and Long Beach face a wave of Trump tariffs

Los Angeles Times

24-05-2025

Where the Southern California land meets the Pacific waters, the beaches are the glamour-pusses, but it's the ports that are the workhorses that bring in the heavyweight bucks.
Lately, maybe not quite so much.
The yo-yoing import tariffs imposed by President Trump have been toying with the massive twin-engine economies of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. They're operated separately by the cities of L.A. and Long Beach, but considered together, they are far and away the busiest container port complex in the U.S., or maybe the Western Hemisphere.
It's from here, on San Pedro Bay, that the journeys by trucks and rail and plane begin, ferrying out to the rest of the country the billions of goods, overwhelmingly Chinese-made — all those holiday toys, all that kitchenware and household tools, even all that MAGA gear — that fill store shelves and warehouses and shopping lists.
The ports had to invent themselves in the first place, out of muddy marshes and shallows, to become the present-day enterprises doing billions of dollars of business and compete and partner with the massive Asian container ports across the Pacific. Now the tariffs taffy-pulling may spur another moment for reinvention.
The ports have many ways to divvy up their numbers, to claim to be first and biggest and most. Together, their operations range more than 15,000 acres on land and water, and two years ago they rang up almost $22 billion in what's called direct revenue to local service providers, ponied up $2.7 billion a year in state and local taxes, and accounted for at least 165,000 paychecks, and many thousands more across the nation's consumer supply chain.
Earlier this month, a reporter asked Trump about the slide in cargo traffic at U.S. ports, with the cascading wallop to businesses and workers and customers. To the contrary, said Trump: Such a slowdown 'means we lose less money ... so when you say it's slowed down, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.'
It is, in fact, a bad thing. When you so much as tap the brakes on the port operations — and the initial 145% tariffs imposed on China and less elsewhere was more like slamming them on — the pileup effect is a trade SigAlert of immense proportions. In early May, the tariff effect meant that the ports clocked a cargo drop of something between 25% and 30%.
The port of L.A. has come far from its unpromising beginnings. Hollywood-fashion, it fudges a bit about its age — to make itself older. The port dates itself from October 1542, when the Spanish seafarer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo spotted the mudflats of the San Pedro coast as he sailed past. The captain of the first European ship to reach the future U.S. West Coast adjudged it 'a port enclosed and very good.' That may have appeared true to a man whose flagship measured about 100 feet long — the same distance the DMV says you should signal an upcoming turn — but in time, the hunger for harbors would convert the shallow San Pedro waters into a bona fide port.
San Diego and San Francisco are more natural ports. For a time from the late 1880s, Redondo Beach, with its steep, deep offshore canyon, did a brisk trade as a port for lumber to build L.A. But, as I like to say, L.A. never let nature thwart its self-invention.
Richard Henry Dana was a Boston Brahmin and a Harvard man who took to sea on an ordinary merchant ship. In 1835, he came ashore at San Pedro, a port so rudimentary that sugar barrels and other goods the sailors unloaded had to be carried 'California fashion' up to the blufftop, man by laboring man, and the valuable cattle hides nicknamed 'California bank notes' were rolled down the bluff for sailors to hoist onto their heads and carry out onto the waiting ship.
When Dana returned to San Pedro just before the Civil War began, he could 'scarce recognize the hill up which we rolled and dragged and pushed our heavy loads.' It was a place transformed, with railroads and wharves running at capacity. Much of this was the work of 'the father of the port,' Phineas Banning, an indefatigable Wilmington, Del., native who bestowed that town's name on the one he founded here.
Banning had made the port into a commercial powerhouse. Soon, two of the titans of the age and place — Southern Pacific railroad man Collis P. Huntington and L.A. Times owner Harrison Gray Otis — engaged in a Godzilla-versus-King Kong struggle over where to put L.A.'s official port: Santa Monica or San Pedro? Political money and political muscle came down on the side of San Pedro in 1897.
One way or another, Los Angeles pretty much always got what it wanted. And in 1897, the harbor towns of San Pedro and Wilmington weren't within Los Angeles' civic embrace, and L.A. was eager to get the jump on Long Beach.
So in 1909, voters in both towns agreed to be annexed by L.A., tethered by a 'shoestring strip' of land about 16 miles long and a half-mile wide, a legal but comically gerrymandered umbilicus between the bulk of the city and the singularly different seafront and harbor neighborhoods.
The work of running a port is a constant maintenance of channels, breakwaters, bridges, and the machinery of seagoing commerce. Importers and exporters opened offices at the port, and pleasure cruise companies sent their passenger ships up and down the Pacific coast, and then to Hawaii and across the Pacific.
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent the U.S. Navy's white-painted fleet on a round-the-world voyage to show the nation's naval might and reach. In 1908, it steamed memorably past crowds waving along San Pedro Bay, just as Long Beach was planning to turn its own marshes and mudflats into a port, and soon dredging a channel connecting Long Beach with the L.A. port.
The Long Beach port was dedicated in 1911, and like Southern California itself, went like gangbusters. The Panama Canal opened in 1914, giving U.S. shipping a big flex in seagoing nimbleness at a moment when Europe was going to war.
In the 1950s, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis — soon to be familiar on American shores as the second husband of Jacqueline Kennedy — supposedly declared that Long Beach was 'the world's most modern shipping port.'
Shipyards in both ports sent their new vessels from their cradles out into the world. Beginning in the 1920s, oil burst cinematically out of the ground at wells across the coastal South Bay and even into the Long Beach harbor. So much oil got sucked out of the port and its neighborhoods that the ground started to subside, in some places yards deep. The infrastructure damage has run into the billions, and in the 1960s, 'Operation Big Squirt' started injecting water underground to restabilize the land.
In 1930, both Ford and Procter & Gamble had set up plants near the water's edge, the better and faster to move products. For P&G's debut, Harriet Hauge, the Long Beach mayor's white-gloved daughter, christened a four-foot-long 'boat' made entirely out of cakes of Ivory soap, whose motto was, 'It floats!'
Back in 1908, the Great White Fleet had sailed right past the ports. Within a dozen years, the ports became central to U.S. Navy operations, building ships through World War II, and making Long Beach a sailors' town, the home port for the Pacific Fleet.
And then, just like the wartime industries of L.A., the peacetime ports swiveled to more commercial operations. The Navy moved many of its operations to San Diego after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The shipbuilding pretty much came to an end, and the commercial fishing trade of some thousand vessels that once kept canneries working in high gear has moved elsewhere.
In its stead came a cargo trade of astounding scale. In the late 1950s, shipments started being standardized in cargo containers that made it easier and faster to unload a ship and hasten its cargo on its way.
About 20 years later, free-trade agreements began moving mass-produced goods in thousands of enormous containers from factories in South Korea, in Vietnam, and most of all from China, into the hands of American consumers — via the ports of L.A. and Long Beach.
All of this changed port jobs, and lost port jobs, and created other jobs all along the cargo chain. Los Angeles was a town hostile to organized labor, but labor forces in the harbor had the backing of national longshore unions, including the radical-leaning International Workers of the World, the so-called 'Wobblies,' and the city resisted their strength with formidable anti-union organizing laws.
The Southern California chapter of the ACLU was born out of an incident during a strike in the L.A. harbor in May 1923. Police had arrested about 30 leaders at the port workers' strike and walkout. Then several hundred men who had called for the work stoppage were rounded up and held without bail in a specially built 'stockade.'
Several days later, author Upton Sinclair stood on a hilltop above the harbor, and began reading from the Bill of Rights. He was arrested. So was the man who took his place, and the man after that and the man after that.
L.A. was now engaged in the movement of the moment: rising organized labor and civil rights versus government and private industry joining forces to suppress them. [At one point, the KKK was helping L.A. police in a show of force to break the strike.] Then, in 1934, a nearly three-month strike by port workers up and down the West Coast ended in the creation of the longshore and warehouse workers' union, which represents harbor workers to this day.
The present battle is over robot automation and the risks of job losses in those changeovers.
Workers have not been alone in their grievances against the harbor. The harbor neighborhoods are probably the most polluted part of a very polluted city, owing to the filth that the port generates.
Every day, as my colleague Thomas Curwen described it a few years ago, the big rigs take a shortcut through a small Wilmington neighborhood, sending out dirt and noise and diesel fumes. It isn't just one street. Port roads jammed with diesel trucks, oil refineries processing fuel, ships idling to be unloaded, make for some of the worst air in the state.
Residents of that Wilmington street petitioned and pleaded and then resorted to blocking off the street briefly to the trucks that shook the ground and spewed the filth through their neighborhood. Wilmington has been told that solutions are around the corner, yet just the plans for a remedy don't have to be completed for another two years.
In the city of Los Angeles, there are three 'proprietary' departments, operations that pay for themselves, pretty much without tax money and with their own commissions, independent of the City Council, powerful entities unto themselves.
The airports and the Department of Water and Power are two; the third is the port.
In 1967, The Times investigated the doings of harbor commissioners, and a grand jury, following up on that, called for indictments of past and present commissioners for perjury and criminal conflicts of interest. Two of the four were convicted of accepting bribes.
The name of the president of the harbor commission, Pietro Di Carlo, a leading citizen of San Pedro, had come up in the investigation in connection with a contract with a troubled development company that Di Carlo had had associations with.
And one morning in early November 1967, about six weeks before the indictments were issued, and a few hours after he went to 6 a.m. Mass, he was found dead in a channel in the harbor, face down, his hat floating nearby. The coroner found that no foul play was involved, and that his death was accidental. His widow said that he had gone to the harbor to reserve a boat, and had been taking medicine that sometimes made him dizzy.
This scandal was a stain on Mayor Sam Yorty, who had appointed the harbor commissioners. A few years later, Times political columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote about the political clout of big donors sponsoring a Yorty fundraiser. Annoyed, Yorty confronted Boyarsky at the fundraiser. 'Boyarsky, I don't know what I'm going to do with you.'
Boyarsky, remembering the dead man in the water, put up his hands in comic defense. 'Oh no, mayor,' he said. 'Not the harbor!'
Yorty was not amused.