The Box - Marc Levinson [109]
Fortified by increasing confidence in their economic prospects, Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Long Beach were in a constant state of construction. Sea-Land opened container service from Seattle to Alaska in 1964, a few days before the devastating Alaska earthquake created huge demand for construction supplies and relief shipments. The U.S. buildup in Vietnam sent a flood of aid cargoes through Los Angeles and Long Beach. Oakland’s nonmilitary container shipments, just 365,085 tons in 1965, quadrupled to 1.5 million tons in 1968 and doubled again to 3 million tons in 1969, as Japanese and European ship lines began pushing containers through the port. By now, nearly 60 percent of Oakland’s cargo was moving in containers. Los Angeles attracted four Japanese lines to a new terminal. Long Beach, anticipating that the shallower Los Angeles harbor would soon force ship lines to look elsewhere, began building space to handle ten ships at a time at three new terminals, including a hundred-acre site for Sea-Land alone. Seattle began no fewer than three new terminals with no tenants in place, driven by a new imperative: if the supply of terminal space was not adequate to meet the demand for container shipping, the ships might go somewhere else.15
Two traditional maritime centers stood aside from the frenzy. Portland, which handled nearly as much cargo as Seattle during the 1950s, could not muster the money or resources to build a containerport. The consequences were severe. Seattle’s foreign trade more than doubled between 1963 and 1972, but Portland’s barely grew. Once Japanese containerships began to call at Seattle, in 1970, Portland found itself receiving Japanese goods by truck from Seattle rather than by ship from Yokohama. San Francisco faced more fundamental problems, because the city’s location, on a congested peninsula with direct rail access only to the south, was ill-suited to handling freight to and from points east. City officials managed to get dredging under way in 1968 after wresting control of their port away from the state, but actual construction of container piers was delayed so long that even American President Lines, whose predecessor companies had made their home in the city for more than a century, finally decamped for Oakland. The city’s plans kept changing, even as Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Long Beach opened one huge purpose-built container terminal after another. In 1969, a Swedish ship line’s massive neon sign, a fixture of the San Francisco water-front for decades, was moved across to the Oakland side of the bay, the glowing words “JOHNSON LINE” offering San Franciscans a nightly reminder that their city’s time as a major port was over.16
The explosion of port construction on the Pacific coast, starting in the 1950s, had no counterpart on the other side of the country. After Grace Line abandoned its ill-fated container service to Venezuela, Sea-Land was left as the only company using dedicated ships to move containers in the East. The many other lines that advertised container service handled boxes along with mixed freight and did not need special cranes or storage yards. More important, the extraordinary enthusiasm for containerization shown by Pacific Coast ports was little in evidence on the Atlantic, except at Sea-Land’s home port in New Jersey. The West Coast ports that embraced containerization, save for Los Angeles, were withering in the late 1950s, and they saw salvation in the new technology. The ports on the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico had a steadier flow of cargo: as late as 1966, nine of the ten largest maritime routes for U.S. international trade passed through ports on the East Coast or the Gulf, and only one touched the West Coast. The eastern ports had less to gain from containerization, and, outside of New York, their eagerness to invest millions of