Look around any room: much of what is there likely passed through the San Pedro Bay in Los Angeles County.

The industrialized harbor occupying the bay, which is divided between San Pedro’s Port of Los Angeles and the neighboring Port of Long Beach, has long been the nation’s dominant port complex. The pair of ports trade superlatives monthly, which saw the highest volume of container movement in the U.S. Their influence on the American economy was perhaps most clearly seen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a persistent logjam of container ships lining the coast led to nearly two years of odious headlines and emptier store shelves.

Together, the two ports account for between one-third and 40% of the U.S.’s import volume.

“If you’re sitting, wearing or looking at something right now, the chances are it came through the Port of Los Angeles,” said Gene Seroka, the port’s executive director, in an interview with the Business Journal. “That’s very powerful in and of itself.”

The origins of this power are a familiar American story, one of westward exploration, settlement and conflict, and political jockeying that illustrated the U.S. by the eras bookending its Civil War. The decision to dredge San Pedro Bay into the ports complex would ultimately play a significant role in making the Greater Los Angeles region the economic powerhouse it is today, one that has guided the nation to its stature 250 years after its defiance of the British Empire.

“I think it’s severely underappreciated as a story,” said James Tejani, author of “A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America,” in an interview. “I think nothing is determining more what the direction of the United States is headed in right now.”

A machine humming along

Even with the unpredictability of President Donald Trump’s trade policies affecting trans-Pacific trading partners, the twin ports have maintained their impact.

Their combined container and cargo volumes handled last year set an all-time record for the San Pedro Bay complex. Those 20.1 million 20-foot-equivalent units, or TEUs, generated a total economic value of $1.6 trillion for the United States last year, about 5% of the nation’s gross domestic product in 2025, according to a report by Martin Associates commissioned by the Pacific Maritime Association.

Those ports supported about 3.6 million jobs in California last year, along with $893 billion in economic output, representing about 22% of the state’s economy, according to that report.

“Los Angeles is often described as an entertainment capital, and that is true, but it is also one of the great production and logistics regions of the world,” said Nina Turner, senior director of government affairs and economic development partnerships for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. “Our economy is built not only on creativity and culture, but also on production, movement, trade, and global connectivity. The ports are central to that story because they gave the region access to the things that industries need to grow: materials, markets, Asia and the Pacific economy, and national distribution networks.”

There remains room to grow for the ports, which the Martin Associates report noted continue to rank near the bottom of global efficiency evaluations. Ongoing and planned infrastructure upgrades to expand on-dock rail capacity, further dredge port channels and extend terminals are major factors in their plans to essentially double cargo capacity by 2050.

“We have a rich and vibrant history, but when you look at the competitive landscape and global trade, we as America’s major gateway have to invest in our infrastructure,” said Noel Hacegaba, who became the Port of Long Beach’s chief executive in January. “We have to think like a 115-year-old startup, because ports are not just critical infrastructure; they’re places of innovation. Recognizing that our secret sauce to bring us to this point is not going to be the secret sauce to carry us into the future, that’s what the 2050 vision is all about.”

The nation’s economic engine

The story of how the San Pedro Bay was set on the path to becoming a national economic engine dates back to the beginning of California’s statehood.

As outlined in “A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth,” it’s a web of names that include explorers like Edward Ord, George Davidson and Alexander Bache, who helmed varying efforts to map the West Coast and San Pedro Bay through surveys and geodesy.

The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey would ultimately be merged into what is now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

History-minded Angelenos may be familiar with the name Manuel Dominguez, whose Californio family owned what was then Rancho San Pedro and the estuary that would become the Port of L.A. They will also recognize Phineas Banning, who led the first commercialized shipping operation in the San Pedro Bay and is hailed as “the father of the Port of L.A.”

The L.A. neighborhood of Wilmington is so named for Banning’s hometown in Delaware.

Tejani’s history of how the San Pedro Bay was mapped and how planners and politicians sought railway access to the nation’s new West Coast aligns in many ways with Manifest Destiny, an ideology that held that Americans were to expand across the continent, as ordained by God.

One example of this providence is the late revelation of San Gorgonio Pass, now a stretch of Interstate 10 surrounded by wind turbines, as a competitive option for the eventual transcontinental railroad.

“What’s interesting about it is that L.A. was not the place where they initially imagined that happening,” Tejani said. “Lewis and Clark, they end up at the mouth of the Columbia River. San Francisco Bay is identified very early. By the late 1830s, the U.S. is making these overtures and offers to Mexico to buy it. L.A. isn’t the place, but nonetheless, L.A. becomes the place. That’s remarkable.”

Before development, the San Pedro Bay would play a role in the Civil War as the origin of Union supply lines that enabled Union victories in the lesser-known Southwestern skirmishes with secessionists, courtesy of Banning’s land and shipping operations.

Additionally, Senator Jefferson Davis’ support for the San Gorgonio Pass, an appeal to Southern-sympathizing Los Angeles, initially poisoned the route’s prospects due to his later role as Confederate president. It was cleared for use only after approval by federal scientists and engineers.

Several factors would urge the development of a West Coast port near the end of the 19th century. Access to the Pacific Ocean and the emergence of industrialization would, for some, expand Manifest Destiny beyond our shores. The development of the Panama Canal also became an incentive for U.S. presidents to join a more accessible world right away.

Thus began a succession of events, including the so-called “Free Harbor Fight” between the city and railroad baron Collis Huntington, who wished to locate what would become the Port of L.A. in Santa Monica. It also led to the creation and deployment of the massive hydraulic dredge, eponymously called “San Pedro,” to carve out San Pedro Bay, and to a voter referendum to annex the 16-mile “shoestring” linking the main center of L.A. to San Pedro and Wilmington.

From the ports come Los Angeles

Turner described this development as a “major accelerator” for L.A. becoming a global economic powerhouse – particularly when containerization began in the 1960s.

“It gave Southern California a gateway to global markets and helped turn Los Angeles from a regional center into a major urban economy,” said Turner, who served as a government relations liaison and policy analyst for the Port of Long Beach before joining LAEDC. “I think of the ports as part of the infrastructure that gave Los Angeles economic scale. Entertainment helped tell the story of Los Angeles to the world, but the ports helped connect Los Angeles to the world economy.”

In considering this history, Hacegaba turned to other great cities of the world as a corollary.

“When you think of all the major cities throughout world history, virtually all of them had one thing in common: they were port cities,” he said. “Americans may not think about ports every day, but ports affect their lives every day, whether it’s medical supplies, electronics, apparel, automotive parts, agricultural exports, household goods. The products that move through our ports here in America keep American businesses operating and American families supplied.”

Hacegaba noted that “it’s hard to imagine Los Angeles being such a major economic engine, or the state of California to be the world’s fourth largest economy without ports.”

L.A. and Long Beach ports will continue to set the tone for their peers as improvements are completed.

The twin ports in the early 2000s pioneered the Clean Air Action Plan to reduce particulates and emissions from ships and terminal equipment, which had become the largest single source of emissions in the county. Onshore powering, hooking up cargo vessels to the local electrical grid upon docking, in lieu of their diesel generators, was first demonstrated here.

Other innovations are on display now. Battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are being tested as replacement power trains for drayage trucks and heavy terminal equipment. This is paving the way for the development of charging depots and other infrastructure from the South Bay to the Inland Empire, catering to the first leg of offloaded cargo getting to its destination. Expansion of rail capacity to connect the ports through the Alameda Corridor – which itself traces its origins to Banning’s original lines – to new depots will hasten the movement of goods across the nation.

“The next chapter for the ports will be about modernization, sustainability, resilience and workforce transition,” Turner said. “For much of the last century, the question was how to move more goods faster. That will still matter, but it will not be enough. In the coming decades, the ports will also have to move goods cleaner, smarter and more efficiently.”

The Business Journal’s exploration of its “America 250” project unintentionally illustrates the influence of the San Pedro Bay’s development on Greater L.A.’s trajectory. Garment manufacturing took off and remains prominent thanks to the region’s access to global markets. Having hosted shipbuilding during World War II, the defense sector became a natural next step during the Cold War, with avenues for importing materials and exporting products. That military influence contributed heavily to the development of Hollywood as a source of American soft power. And federal investment in infrastructure development relied heavily on shepherding the dredging and breakwater installation at San Pedro Bay.

For Tejani – who grew up in Long Beach and is an associate professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo – it was a simple proposition: the Hollywood we all know is in transition without an obvious end, while trade has only continued to rise even amid uncertainty.

“It’s this unseen area of influence that L.A. has over the nation, and even some transnational spaces,” he said. “L.A. can reshape the U.S. economy, whether it’s solar panels and batteries coming in, and the shifting of industry and manufacturing. No one thinks about how L.A. is the crux of that reshaping of the entire American economy, particularly in the last 20 to 30 years.”