The Box - Marc Levinson [106]
Above all, the Pacific ports were victims of geography. Although the port cities themselves were large and growing quickly, their hinterlands were very thinly populated. All of California beyond Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay had barely six million inhabitants in 1960, and the eight Rocky Mountain states, stretching a thousand miles to the east, had a combined population smaller than New York City’s. The first important city inland of Seattle was Minneapolis, sixteen hundred miles away. While the West’s industries were expanding rapidly, only Los Angeles-Long Beach had a manufacturing base that could rival the factory centers of the East and Midwest. Whereas Baltimore and Philadelphia could handle the foreign-trade needs of Pittsburgh and Chicago, the West Coast ports had no similar domestic markets, and potential trading partners across the Pacific, such as Korea, China, and the nations of Indochina, were cut off by war or politics. With cargo flows flat, except for oil, the ports had no avenue for growth. Seattle’s docks saw 10 percent less cargo in 1960 than in 1950. Tacoma, mainly a lumber port a few miles south on Puget Sound, had lost one-third of its traffic over the same decade as the timber companies shifted their business to the rails. Tonnage in Portland fell by 17 percent. The only West Coast port that grew during the 1950s was Los Angeles, which invested in new wharves and warehouses in hopes of challenging the regional dominance of San Francisco.5
Containerization offered a chance to escape these geographic constraints. Instructed by the efforts of Matson, whose studies of container service to Hawaii envisioned the Pacific ports becoming hubs for truck pickups and deliveries in Denver and Salt Lake City, civic leaders up and down the West Coast looked afresh at their deteriorating waterfronts. The action began in San Francisco, where the state of California oversaw ninety-six outmoded piers. Many were narrow wooden docks unchanged since the 1920s, and even those that were structurally sound were not designed for large trucks. Consultants recommended a new “superterminal” big enough to handle eight oceangoing ships, to be located at Army Street south of downtown. In 1958, California voters approved $50 million of bonds for the port, a substantial amount for the time.6
Seattle soon followed San Francisco’s lead and hired a consultant to help save its port. All of Seattle’s twenty-one piers predated the end of World War II, and most had been built for sailing ships shortly after 1900. By the late 1950s, only six piers were in parttime use for general cargo, and the port’s tax-advantaged foreign trade zone was so quiet that the Seattle Port Commission, a county agency, considered closing it. A local television documentary about the sorry state of the port turned the political situation around in 1959. Business leaders formed a port committee, and in July 1960 the Port Commission unveiled a $32 million construction plan that included two container terminals. The port was suddenly the center of attention: in November 1960, no fewer than seventeen candidates stood for election to the Port Commission. Voters approved a $10 million bond issue for the first stage of construction.7
Los Angeles, where the new Long Beach and Harbor Freeways had been designed to move trucks out of the port, kept pace. City officials tried aggressively to persuade voters of the port’s economic importance, and they were rewarded with authority to issue revenue bonds—bonds that would be serviced with ship lines’ lease payments—in a 1959 referendum. By 1960, Matson’s two-year-old container service to Hawaii, using facilities Matson had improved at its own expense, moved seven thousand containers across the docks. It was a tiny operation compared with Sea-Land’s base