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By Root 969 0

When the mess was finally cleaned up, the city-owned port found itself with a deeper harbor than Los Angeles. It snagged Sea-Land’s southern California terminus in 1962 and dedicated its oil revenues to constructing a 310-acre landfill. The twin ports were soon waging a rate war that left Los Angeles, which had no oil and needed to turn a profit, at a disadvantage. Los Angeles and San Francisco asked the Federal Maritime Commission, the regulator, to block Sea-Land’s deals at Long Beach and Oakland on the ground that they involved unfair subsidies, to no avail. Up the coast, Seattle, where two container terminals were under construction, announced a $30 million program to build more in August 1962, even though the seasonal Alaska Steamship operation was the only container business in the port. The ports were suddenly full of activity. The flow of nonmilitary cargo, flat for a decade, rose by one-third between 1962 and 1965.12

Then Oakland raised the bar. The port’s ambitions centered on an area known as the Outer Harbor, bisected by an embankment that had once carried passenger trains to their terminus at a ferry landing. The Port Commission was out of money after expanding the Oakland airport, but the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, which began designing its regional rail system in 1963, came to its rescue. In return for permission to tunnel beneath port property, the rail agency agreed to clear abandoned buildings along the embankment, construct a 9,100-foot dike, and fill the enclosed area with dirt excavated in tunnel construction. Oakland designed an enormous terminal for the 140-acre site, with 12 berths, wharves 78 feet wide—wide enough to erect cranes that would straddle the dockside railroad tracks—and the ability to accommodate ships of almost any length. The outermost dock was barely a mile from 60-foot water depth in San Francisco Bay, assuring that the port would remain accessible as ships became larger.

Oakland delegations visited Japan, in 1963, and Europe, in 1964, and learned that several ship lines were interested in containerization. None of them was prepared to sign a contract that would allow the port to sell revenue bonds, but a timely $10 million grant from the federal Economic Development Administration, intended to generate jobs in the depressed city, supplied construction funds. A new terminal was rushed into construction, without a tenant, before new environmental regulations took effect. With that project under way, Sea-Land decided in 1965 that it needed more space, and signed a contract for a twenty-six-acre terminal with two big shoreside cranes. A few months later, Matson, hitherto a purely domestic company, announced that Oakland’s new landfill would be its base for an unsubsidized service carrying containers between the Pacific Coast and Asia.13

Behind this frenzied expansion of long-neglected ports was the emergence of an entirely new line of thought about economic growth. Manufacturing was almost universally regarded as the bedrock of a healthy local economy in the 1960s, and much of the value of a port, aside from jobs on the docks, was that transportation-conscious manufacturers would locate nearby. As early as 1966, though, public officials in Seattle were sensing that their remote city, with little industry, might be able to develop a new economy based on distribution rather than on factories. The lack of population close at hand would be no obstacle; Seattle could become not merely a local port for western Washington but the center of a distribution network stretching from Asia to the U.S. Midwest. “Commodity distribution has grown out of the dependent sector to link production and consumption,” port planner Ting-Li Cho wrote presciently. “It has become an independent sector that, in return, determines the economy of production and consumption.” Much the same message, with opposite implications for the local economy, was transmitted that same year to San Francisco officials by consulting firm Arthur D. Little. A great proportion of the city’s wholesaling, trucking, and warehousing