Port of Los Angeles

The Port of Los Angeles is a seaport managed by the Los Angeles Harbor Department, a unit of the City of Los Angeles. It occupies of land and water with of waterfront and adjoins the separate Port of Long Beach. Promoted as "America's Port", the port is located in San Pedro Bay in the San Pedro and Wilmington neighborhoods of Los Angeles, approximately south of downtown. The cargo coming into the port represents approximately 20% of all cargo coming into the United States. The port's channel depth is . The port has 25 cargo terminals, 82 container cranes, 8 container terminals, and of on-dock rail. The port's top imports were furniture, automobile parts, apparel, footwear, and electronics. In 2019, the port's top exports were wastepaper, pet and animal feed, scrap metal and soybeans. In 2020 the port's top three trading partners were China (including Hong Kong), Japan, and Vietnam. In 2022, the port, together with the adjoining Port of Long Beach, were considered amongst the world's least efficient ports by the World Bank and IHS Markit citing union protectionism and a lack of automation. Image:LA-Harbor-1899.jpg|The L.A. Harbor, 1899 Image:LA-Harbor-1913.jpg|Port of Los Angeles, 1913 In 1542, Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo discovered the "Bay of Smokes." The south-facing San Pedro Bay was originally a shallow mudflat, too soft to support a wharf. Visiting ships had two choices: stay far out at anchor and have their goods and passengers ferried to shore, or beach themselves. That sticky process is described in Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., who was a crew member on an 1834 voyage that visited San Pedro Bay. Phineas Banning greatly improved shipping when he dredged the channel to Wilmington in 1871 to a depth of . The port handled 50,000 tons of shipping that year. Banning owned a stagecoach line with routes connecting San Pedro to Salt Lake City, Utah, and Yuma, Arizona, and in 1868 he built a railroad to connect San Pedro Bay to Los Angeles, the first in the area.