The Center's tour of Terminal Island, an artificial landscape in the heart of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, was organized as part of an exhibit about this remarkable place, on view at CLUI Los Angeles from March 31 to May 30th, 2005. But however vivid an exhibit can be there is still nothing like being there, so on the morning of May 14, we loaded up a bus with 50 paying passengers and headed south on the 405 freeway, to our terminal destination.

The tour really started even before the bus arrived to pick up the passengers, in the form of anticipation, uncertain expectations, and preconceptions. If Terminal Island exists at all in one’s imagination, it is most likely as a neglected place, a place that people forget about, or ignore, quietly nagging at one’s subconscious. It is a sort of noir space, a doppelganger to Los Angeles, more "Chinatown" then Chinatown. And perhaps too it exists in the imagination because it is a frequent film location, playing, as was suggested by the manager of a shipyard that is one of Terminal Island’s busiest filming locations, “every port in the world but itself.”

The cinematic, noir qualities of ports in general may be partially due to recollections of filmic depictions of nefarious deals going down between ship and shore, or of dockworkers violently opposing management, or corrupt unions, a la On the Waterfront. This is partially a symptom of our lack of better images to give form to the port, something this tour was hoping to address.

The metropolitan gaze no longer falls upon the waterfront, and a cognitive blankness follows. Thus despite increasing international mercantile dependence on ocean transport, and despite advances in oceanography and marine biology, the sea is in many respects less comprehensible to today’s elites than it was before 1945, in the nineteenth-century, or even during the Enlightenment.
-Allan Sekula, Fish Story

As the bus passed through the “South Bay Curtain” – the invisible, cultural barrier that keeps a lot of people in Los Angeles from venturing south of LAX – we entered into the Port’s realm of influence: the first of the refineries connected to the port; the satellite manufacturers; the north American headquarters for Toyota and Nissan. We turned south onto the Harbor Freeway, getting closer.

Terminal Island originated as a fraction of land, in the form of a barrier of sediment in the estuary of the Los Angeles River and the Dominguez Slough, called Rattlesnake Island. In 1891, the Terminal Land Company purchased the island and a railway was built on to its east side by the Los Angeles Terminal Railroad Company. The area was renamed Terminal Island, and was expected to become a terminus for a rail system linking the nation’s interior via the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad. Gradually the island grew, as dredges deepened the channels of the harbor, and dumped the spoils onto its expanding margins.

Phineas Banning is often cited as the “Father of the harbor.” He established one of the first transport companies in the area, based at Wilmington, a town he founded in 1858 and named after his home town in Delaware. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, with no natural deep harbor in the region, several Southern California seaside communities were hoping to establish a major port on their shoreline, most notably at places along Santa Monica Bay. Banning, however, had successfully lobbied Congress for money to dredge the channel from the ocean to Wilmington, allowing ships to dock along what is now the port’s Main Channel, and establishing San Pedro/Wilmington as the favored site for the port. Harbor deepening continues to be a large program at the port, and is still mostly supported by the federal government. Currently the Army Corps of Engineers is engaged in a multi-year $253 million program to deepen the port’s channels from 45 feet deep to 53 feet deep to accommodate the ever increasing sizes of ships that ply the Pacific.

At the base of the Harbor Freeway, after passing the Unocal Refinery, and the first of many sets of looming hammerhead container cranes, at the Yang Ming Line berths, the bus transitioned onto the ramp of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which soars over the main port channel, and offers a sweeping, panoramic view of the port, before plummeting down onto Terminal Island itself.

At the first exit on the island we passed by the under-utilzed Customs House (most of the Port’s customs offices are now at the Port of Long Beach) with its beautiful federal eagle medallion flying over its unused modernist portico (all services enter by vehicle through the back – there are no pedestrians on the public streets of Terminal Island anymore). We then picked up the first terminal thread of the day, the Los Angeles Export Terminal (LAXT), one of the visually dominant structures on the island. LAXT opened with much fanfare in 1997 as yet another emblem of the new, hyper-mechanized global port of the future. Coal from the western United States was shipped by rail to LAXT, stored in massive pads outside, then transported by a covered conveyor across the island to a giant, specialized conveyor crane, which loaded the coal onto ships, bound for power plants in the orient. That was the idea. Soon after opening, the global market for coal changed, and coal from Australia and other places in Asia much closer to where it was needed became available. LAXT has since been bound up in law suits, conflict of interest battles, and other quarrels amongst its 37 corporate partners, which include the Port of Los Angeles, a public entity, which has complicated things further.

LAXT’s future, for now, seems to be in petroleum coke, collected from the area’s refineries, and shipped to Japan for use in steel and cement making. At the “backland” side of LAXT, next to the Customs House, inside the two massive hemispheric domes (that nearly everyone whose work takes them to Terminal Island regularly, has a similar, feminine anatomical name for), petroleum coke from Chevron’s refinery at El Segundo is stored awaiting shipment. A company called Savage Pacific Services, out of Utah, operates the backland area, while the national pipeline and terminal operator company Kinder Morgan operates the conveyor and berth part of LAXT.

The bus followed the snaking conveyor from dome to berth, then veered into the old fish cannery part of the island, on short streets with names like Sardine and Tuna, past large empty looking former cannery buildings – a “for lease” sign on the Chicken of the Sea building. The canneries were next to Fish Harbor, a small port within the port, once used by the fishing fleet. Though fishing boats can still be seen docked around the port, the only operating cannery left on Terminal Island is Starkist, at the end of Barracuda Street, across from the Impress can factory. The rest of the old cannery buildings seem to have been taken over as movie sets, and exhibit strange, irregular patinas of fake grime and smoke. On Tuna Street is the only remaining retail establishment on the island, a small Korean grocery.

From this small scale, historic, and dense development around Fish Harbor, we crossed Terminal Way for a brief look into the container operations that cover most of the land at Terminal Island. Each of the major shipping company’s container berth area covers over a hundred acres of asphalt with hardly any fixed buildings. It’s a landscape of movement. While we will visit this aspect of the port in greater detail later in the tour, in an effort to drive on every public road on the island, we looped around through narrow gauntlets of chain link and k-rail, to a turn around area under the Vincent Thomas Bridge, with a good view of the Evergreen and Yusen container operations. We could see the hammerhead cranes lifting 40 foot containers out of the holds of ships, lowering them onto trailers pulled by trucks, that shuttle them onto rail cars. From one mode of travel to another, to another, then away.

Excrete Treat
The next stop on the tour was the Terminal Island Treatment Plant, one of two wastewater treatment plants operated by the City of Los Angeles that discharge directly to the ocean. As the end of the line for the fluids of the city, the plant serves a very terminal function. Dave Gumaer, plant operations manager, boarded the bus and gave a rousing, spirited talk about the history and importance of waste treatment. He then guided the bus through the facility, pointing out its features and describing their functions. The group then disembarked and soaked up the sights and smells of the bubbling bacteria tanks before them, a network of odiferous fountains of public waste. What isn’t processed as liquid and emitted through a submerged discharge pipe off Terminal Island is trucked up to the City of LA sludge ranch in Kern County where it is used as fertilizer for feedcrops.

Staying on the Los Angeles side of the Island, we next headed to the only piece of land on the island not owned by the Port, a rectangular projection owned by the federal government. Three federal facilities operate on this extremity, sometimes referred to as Reservation Point. On one side is the Coast Guard’s Integrated Support Command, San Pedro, where 500 people work keeping an eye on the Port of LA/Long Beach, and the nearby coast. We picked up Anita Abbott, an Executive Officer for the Coast Guard, our local briefer, who guided us through the otherwise restricted land of Reservation Point. She described the function of the various facilities on the coast guard side, then we dropped her off, and headed back down Seaside Avenue, the main road of the peninsula. On our right was the Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island, whose razor wire was close enough to touch. This notorious, seaside prison, dubbed “Club Fed,” was built in the 1930’s and has housed notables like Al Capone and Charlie Manson. It was designed for 500 prisoners, but like most prisons in California, it has more than twice its designed capacity of inmates.
The third federal facility on Reservation Point is especially terminal. It is where particularly undesirable “unauthorized aliens” are kept before being deported to their nation of origin. Officially, it is the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention and Removal Operations Service Processing Center, and is one of eight in the nation, all in border states. By the time a person gets here, Terminal Island will probably be the last place they will know in the USA.

After passing back out the gates of Federalland, we pass a number of notable sites, including a boathouse for one of the Port’s fireboats, and a memorial to the Japanese fishing community that once thrived here on Terminal Island, before being uprooted and shipped to internment camps for the duration of WWII. The community of nearly 3,000 people was given 48 hours to pack up and leave Terminal Island. Those that returned here after the war found that Terminal Island had been utterly transformed by war production, with newly built terminal areas and tank farms to supply the war effort, and four major ship building yards that were hurriedly constructed, employing 90,000 people at their peak. We headed through the gates into what, until two weeks before, was the only remaining operating shipyard at the port, called Southwest Marine, the remnants of what used to be the Bethlehem Shipyard. Now that it was closed, it could devote itself to its already established parallel existence, as filming location.

As we arrived, the yard was filled with lighting and grip equipment, tents, props, flats, and craft services – the movies were filming somewhere nearby. As we circled the yard in the bus, we watched a clip from Eraser on the bus monitors, a 1996 film that depicts a typical use of Southwest Marine as generic port location. In the film, Arnold Schwarzenegger is after the bad guys who are loading secret, stolen superguns onto an Eastern Bloc ship. Aided by mobster friends, pretending to be angry unionized dockworkers, Schwarzenegger leads the denoument, and the large metal shed building he is being hunted in blows up energetically. This is the building immediately in front of us on the bus, and the repairs to the building are clearly visible. Schwarzenegger then goes on to fight James Caan on top of a shipping container dangling in the air, but we are getting hungry, and its time to go. The bus headed back over the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Ports O’ Call Village, a worse for wear New England style portside tourist development in San Pedro, where mobs of people were eating huge piles of seafood on the boardwalk. We soon took our place in line at the Crusty Crab.

Continue to Part 2 of the tour.

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