With years of research and more than 200 maps and images, PortEconomics member Geraldine Knatz shapes an insightful story of the Port of Los Angeles, from its early entrepreneurs to the city’s business and political leadership, and the inevitable conflicts that arose between them. Knatz digs into the back stories of the key players in a hardcore, well-documented piece of storytelling at its best.
Port of Los Angeles matches a topic—the history of Los Angeles Harbor—with someone of unquestionable authority to tackle the subject. Knatz worked nearly four decades at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, her last eight years as Executive Director at Los Angeles. At the heart of this work is the City-Harbor relationship, that challenging and frequently strained governance dance that formally began in 1907, the year the Los Angeles City Council created its first Board of Harbor Commissioners. The major themes that have shaped—and continue to determine—the Port of L.A.’s history began with the struggle over who governs the harbor and how it was governed. The result was a different kind of municipal operation than the progressives of early twentieth-century Los Angeles envisioned—one that had to be nimble enough to compete on a global basis. Politics, rate wars, duplicate facilities, and Los Angeles’s desire to control Long Beach oil money triggered numerous attempts to merge the two ports—an effort that persists today and probably always will. The Port of L.A.’s formative period shaped its history in the late twentieth century—and continues to impact the still-unfolding twenty-first. Personalities, crimes, power moves disguised as bureaucratic banalities, jurisdictional feuds, and outright warfare—it is all here. So, too, is the way that the port has remained umbilical to Los Angeles: feeding it, for sure, but also tethering it to worlds an ocean away.
A collaboration of an academic institution, the Huntington-USC Institute for California and the West and a commercial publisher, Angel City Press, has produced an authoritative work that reads like a script for another Chinatown, only this time it’s about saltwater and controlling the waterfront, not drinking water and controlling the land. The book takes readers on a journey that will educate and inspire, filling these pages with real-life intrigue, masterminds, and politics extraordinaire.
“The Port of Los Angeles made this city. This very well might be “The Study” of what made modern Los Angeles.” William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.
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