The Port of Los Angeles is the busiest container port in the United States, a city-owned seaport on San Pedro Bay in the San Pedro and Wilmington districts of Los Angeles, about 32 km (20 miles) south of downtown. It handled roughly 10.3 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) in 2024, which placed it 16th in the world in Lloyd's List's One Hundred Container Ports ranking. Its governing Board of Harbor Commissioners dates from 1907, and together with the neighbouring Port of Long Beach it receives about 40% of the shipping containers entering the country; the port's own top trading partners are China, Japan and Vietnam. None of that was given by nature: the bay began as a mudflat, and the port is the product of a century and a half of dredging, lawsuits, landfill and rail building.
1542 to 1871: Cabrillo's Bay of Smokes and Banning's Channel
The first European to record the bay was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who reached it in 1542 and called it the "Bay of Smokes". For the next three centuries San Pedro Bay was a poor anchorage. Its south-facing shore was shallow mudflat, too soft to carry a wharf, so visiting ships either stood far out and ferried goods and passengers ashore in small boats or ran themselves aground. Richard Henry Dana Jr. described the ordeal in Two Years Before the Mast, based on the voyage he crewed in 1834, a voyage that called at San Pedro Bay.
The man who changed that was Phineas Banning, a Delaware-born freight operator who arrived at San Pedro in 1851 at the age of 21. Banning was one of the founders of the town of Wilmington, named after his Delaware birthplace, ran stagecoach lines inland to Salt Lake City and Yuma, and pushed through the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad, the region's first railway, which opened to traffic in 1869. In 1871 he dredged a channel to Wilmington to a depth of 10 feet (3 m). The port handled about 50,000 tons of shipping that year. By 1885, the year Banning died, the figure had reached 500,000 tons, and Los Angeles remembers him as the father of its port.
1892 to 1912: Collis Huntington, the Free Harbor Fight and a City Port
By the 1890s Los Angeles needed a deepwater harbour paid for by the federal government, and the question was where it would go. Collis P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which controlled the rail line into San Pedro, wanted it at Santa Monica, where he had quietly bought most of the waterfront. From 1892 the Southern Pacific built the Long Wharf there, stretching nearly a mile into the bay; when it opened in 1894 it was the longest wharf in the world. Against him stood the Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, the city's chamber of commerce and US Senator Stephen M. White, who spent two days on the Senate floor in June 1896 attacking the railroad's hold on the region's trade.
The Free Harbor Fight ended in 1897, when a board chaired by Rear Admiral John C. Walker recommended San Pedro. The Palos Verdes Peninsula shelters the bay from most heavy seas and gales, which made it the better site on engineering grounds. Federal construction of a breakwater began in 1899. The Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners was created in 1907, and in 1909 Los Angeles annexed the harbour area, bringing the harbour inside the city. In 1912 the Southern Pacific, having lost the argument, completed its first major wharf at the port.
1920s to 1945: Tuna Street, Terminal Island and the Wartime Shipyards
During the 1920s the Port of Los Angeles overtook San Francisco as the busiest seaport on the West Coast. In the early 1930s a second, outer breakwater more than two miles long was built about three miles offshore, with an inner breakwater and new docks off Terminal Island. The improved harbour hosted the sailing events of the 1932 Summer Olympics.
Before refrigeration spread in the 1930s, fish canning was a major industry at the port. StarKist and the Van Camp Seafood Company set up along Tuna Street on Terminal Island, drawing fishermen from Croatia, Japan and Portugal. Japanese Americans began settling there around 1906, recruited by the canneries for their fishing skills, and by 1940 about 3,000 lived on the island. After the attack on Pearl Harbor they were forcibly removed and sent to inland camps with only what they could carry, and the government took much of the island's land by eminent domain for shipbuilding. During the Second World War the port's yards employed more than 90,000 people. A small memorial is all that remains of the Terminal Island fishing village.
1959 to 2002: Hawaiian Merchant, the Vincent Thomas Bridge and the Alameda Corridor
Containerisation reached Los Angeles in 1959, when Matson Navigation Company's Hawaiian Merchant delivered 20 containers to the port. Four years later, in 1963, the Vincent Thomas Bridge opened across the main channel, linking San Pedro with Terminal Island. Named after the San Pedro assemblyman who spent 19 years and 16 pieces of legislation getting it built, it is a 1,500-foot (460 m) suspension bridge with about 185 feet (56 m) of clearance, and it was the first welded suspension bridge in the United States. It ended the island's reliance on ferries, which had carried cannery and shipyard workers since 1870, and opened the way for further expansion of the port.
The volume came quickly. In 1985 the port handled one million containers in a single year for the first time. Space was the next limit, and the answer was to make new land: the Pier 400 Dredging and Landfill Program, completed in 2000, was the largest project of its kind in the United States.
Getting boxes inland was the other bottleneck. The old Southern Pacific line along Alameda Street crossed more than 200 streets at grade. The Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority was formed in August 1989, the ports bought the route from the Southern Pacific for $235 million in 1994, and the authority replaced it with a 20-mile (32 km) freight rail line whose centrepiece is a triple-tracked trench 10 miles long and 33 feet deep. It opened on 15 April 2002 at a cost of about $2.1 billion and lets trains run at 40 mph from the docks of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the BNSF and Union Pacific yards near downtown. The same year a West Coast labour lockout left a large backlog of ships waiting to unload in the bay, an early sign of how much of the national economy ran through this one harbour.
2012 to 2022: A 53-Foot Channel and 109 Ships at Anchor
In 2012 the port and the US Army Corps of Engineers deepened the main navigation channel to 53 feet (16 m), enough for the draught of the largest container ships then in service. By 2013 more than half a million containers were passing through every month.
The COVID-19 pandemic then exposed the limits of that capacity. As consumer demand rebounded after the 2020 lockdowns, ships queued outside the breakwater; in October 2021 a record number of ships were at the docks of the two San Pedro Bay ports, and in early November more than 100 vessels were anchored in San Pedro Bay, where before the pandemic it was unusual for even one to wait. Over 2021 and 2022, 109 container ships were held up at the port, and many operators looked to other ports instead. In July 2021 more than three-quarters of the containers leaving Los Angeles went back to Asia empty. By September 2022 the backlog at US ports had eased, partly because import volumes slowed amid high inflation and rising interest rates.
2024 and After: 10.3 Million TEU and the Air over Wilmington
The recovery came in 2024. Lloyd's List recorded 10,297,000 TEU at Los Angeles that year, up from about 8.6 million in 2023, and the port's own statistics list 1,807 vessel arrivals, 216 million metric revenue tons of cargo worth about $333 billion, and 1,112,893 cruise passengers through the World Cruise Center beneath the Vincent Thomas Bridge. The port reported about 10.2 million TEU for 2025. Today it covers 7,500 acres (3,000 ha) of land and water along 43 miles (69 km) of waterfront, with 25 cargo terminals, eight of them for containers, 82 container cranes and 113 miles (182 km) of on-dock rail. In 2024 it took delivery of three cranes able to work ships of up to 18,000 TEU. Its main imports are furniture, car parts, clothing, footwear and electronics; its main exports in 2019 were wastepaper, animal feed, scrap metal and soybeans.
Size has not brought a reputation for speed. A 2022 ranking by the World Bank and IHS Markit placed Los Angeles and Long Beach among the least efficient container ports in the world, citing slow adoption of automation. Pollution is the other long-running issue. Ocean-going ships and diesel trucks serving the San Pedro Bay ports are a large source of nitrogen oxides in a region with some of the worst smog in the country. In 2004 Los Angeles opened its first Alternative Maritime Power berth, which lets docked ships switch off their engines and plug into the grid; the system can now supply up to 40 MW to two cruise ships at once. The San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Program, launched in October 2002, cut diesel particulate emissions by 72%, sulphur oxides by 93% and nitrogen oxides by 22% by May 2016, passing its 2023 targets early. In 2024 the group Environment California sued the port under the Clean Water Act, and in April 2025 the port settled, paying $1.3 million towards restoring the harbour and a $130,000 civil penalty.
Wilmington, the town Banning founded, now has a waterfront park, opened in June 2011 as a buffer between the terminals and the neighbourhood. The harbour's natural setting, a sheltered bay on a flat coastal plain, is covered in our guide to the geography of Los Angeles. Most of the boxes unloaded here began their voyage at yards like those described in our profile of the Port of Shanghai, and the East Coast gateway that briefly outpaced Los Angeles during the 2022 congestion is covered in our account of the Port of New York and New Jersey.