Exploring A Harbor ~ 1950 Frith Films; Port of Los Angeles

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Los_Angeles

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Port of Los Angeles, also called America's Port and Los Angeles Harbor, is a port complex that occupies 7,500 acres (3,000 ha) of land and water along 43 miles (69 km) of waterfront and adjoins the separate Port of Long Beach. The port is located in San Pedro Bay in the San Pedro and Wilmington neighborhoods of Los Angeles, approximately 20 miles (32 km) south of downtown. A department of the City of Los Angeles, the Port of Los Angeles supports employment for 517,000 people throughout the LA County Region and 1.6 million worldwide. The cargo coming into the port represents approximately 20% of all cargo coming into the United States. The Port's Channel Depth is 53 feet (16 m). The port has 27 cargo terminals, 86 container cranes, 8 container terminals, and 113 miles (182 km) of on-dock rail. The LA Port imports furniture, footwear, electronics, automobile parts, and plastics. The Port exports wastepaper, pet and animal feed, scrap metal, fabrics, and soybeans. The port's major trading partners are China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. For public safety, the Port of Los Angeles utilizes the Los Angeles Port Police for police service in the port and to its local communities, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) to provide fire and EMS services to the port and its local communities, the U.S. Coast Guard for water way security at the port, Homeland Security to protect federal land at the port, the Los Angeles County Lifeguards to provide lifeguard services for open water outside the harbor while Los Angeles City Recreation & Parks Department lifeguards patrol the inner Cabrillo Beach...

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 10 feet (3.0 m). 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.

After Banning's death in 1885, his sons pursued their interests in promoting the port, which handled 500,000 tons of shipping in that year. The Southern Pacific Railroad and Collis P. Huntington wanted to create Port Los Angeles at Santa Monica and built the Long Wharf there in 1893. However, the Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and U.S. Senator Stephen White pushed for federal support of the Port of Los Angeles at San Pedro Bay. The Free Harbor Fight was settled when San Pedro was endorsed in 1897 by a commission headed by Rear Admiral John C. Walker (who later went on to become the chair of the Isthmian Canal Commission in 1904). With U.S. government support, breakwater construction began in 1899, and the area was annexed to Los Angeles in 1909. The Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners was founded in 1907...

In 1912 the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its first major wharf at the port. During the 1920s, the port surpassed San Francisco as the West Coast's busiest seaport...