Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (22 page)

N
early nine out of ten Americans say their daily commute begins with the crank and cough of a car motor. The remainder report that their morning journeys start with the music of coins falling into fare boxes, or the well-oiled click of bicycle freewheels, or the ancient rhythm of soles on sidewalks. The U.S. Census keeps careful track of these commuter statistics. And, data aside, daily experience and preferences suggest these numbers make sense.

Yet the numbers mislead.

For all our preoccupation with its foibles and frustrations, our actual morning rides or walks to work are the least part of our commutes. They are not the first steps in our daily movements but the very last legs in a far longer, far more mysterious daily journey built on the thousands, even millions of miles embedded in our everyday lives, choices, and actions.

So where does our commute truly begin if not in our driveways?

More than anyplace else, the starting line can be found high atop the windswept Pacific bluff of Angels Gate where, seven days a week, the most valuable shopping list in America is created.

There, inside the whitewashed, antennae-studded headquarters of the Marine Exchange, a very pleasant, very busy mother
of four by the name of Debbie Chavez crafts the Magna Carta of the buy-it-now, same-day-delivery world: the Master Queuing List. With it, Chavez holds the lion's share of America's consumer economy in her hands.

If you drive it, wear it, eat it, buy it, drink it, talk into it, type on it, or listen to it, some portion has first passed by Angels Gate. From the morning cup of coffee to the tires on your car to the bike you bought to replace that car to the shoes on your feet and the smartphone in your pocket, all or part passed in and out of the control of Debbie Chavez before it entered your life.

“We do keep busy here,” Chavez observes with the casual understatement of a woman who does something extraordinary so often that she mistakes it for routine.

For generations, Angels Gate has been prized for its coastal vantage point. First came the cannons placed early in the last century to stave off unwanted invasion via the waters below. Later Angels Gate became the ideal spot to track a more benevolent but no less disruptive commercial invasion in the form of a daily, miles-long procession of giant cargo vessels laden with . . . everything.

The blocky Marine Exchange control center's one notable architectural feature, its ocean-facing picture window, offers one of the great juxtapositions in California topography. To the right is a million-dollar view of sun-dappled waves, the rocky enclave of the Palos Verdes peninsula, and the gorgeous green mountain of Catalina Island in the distance. To the left is a $400
billion
view of the hard metal angles and industrial bristle of the twin Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest harbor complex in North America, serving as both barometer and driver of the U.S. economy.

Each day in predawn darkness, Chavez and her crew of marine information specialists arrive at Angels Gate to chart the approaching parade of cargo vessels, gathering cryptic information received via phone, e-mail, and old-school fax from the world's
far-flung maritime shipping lines. The product of these labors is a master daily schedule for a hundred or more impending ship departures, arrivals, crossings of the two-hundred-mile international limit, and shifts to the marine terminal docks from remote harbor anchoring spots (the waterfront equivalent of the doctor's waiting room). Once dockside, the mammoth ships need two to five days to unload and reload before leaving for their next port of call and making room for the next vessel, which means every berth has a waiting line behind it.

Those lines are no small matter: one container ship can be as long as four football fields laid end to end, with as many as 7,000 giant shipping containers filling its hold and stacked on its deck. (There are even bigger container ships sailing now and larger still on the drawing board, but the Southern California ports lack the necessary colossal cranes and other infrastructure to accommodate them—for the moment.) At any one time, fifty such ships may be lingering at the dual ports of LA, waiting their turn.

As much as a billion and a half dollars' worth of product passes through these twin ports every day. Delays can break businesses nationwide and cost consumers millions, interrupting the cornucopia of endeavors the port makes possible: the installation of new air bags in recalled cars, the delivery of the latest computers, the flow and pricing of gasoline, the supply of those all-important silicon chips that are inside everything—from coffeemakers to cash registers to the controllers that keep our traffic lights functioning at hundreds of thousands of intersections. Without that cargo and its timely delivery, all that and so much more grinds to a halt. The Master Queuing List is the essential first step that sets off a well-choreographed transportation chain reaction—the commute to end all commutes.

First, Debbie Chavez sends out the list to inform the work of the traffic controllers and Coast Guard officers at the Marine
Exchange “Watch” peering at their radar and computer displays. They direct and police the approaching vessels.

Then the Master Queuing List is used to schedule the port pilots who race out to meet the ships and guide the laden behemoths in and out of their berths.

The list is next used to staff the day shift with the right number of crane operators, those princes of the docks who lift twenty-ton containers from impossibly tight quarters with the finesse (and pay scale) of brain surgeons.

Then comes the assembly of longshore gangs to unload the goods, and the stevedores in the marine terminals who move and prepare the cargo for shipment out of the port.

Finally, the Master Queuing List is used to dispatch the 40,000 or more big-rig truck trips that swarm into, out of, and around the twin ports every twenty-four hours, carrying the cargo out into the concentric circles of warehouse distribution centers, freight depots, and rail yards that make up America's goods-movement ecology.

Other ports in the American West, East, and South have their own lists and vital roles to play, but LA's Master Queuing List holds a unique place in the trade and transportation continuum because so much of what Americans buy and sell comes from the Pacific Rim, and the twin ports ringing San Pedro harbor are Asia's leading point of entry.

A third of U.S.-bound consumer goods, and far higher percentages of some, pass by the Marine Exchange. That makes Angels Gate and Debbie Chavez the one essential stop for
everyone's
commute—long before you even leave the house.

T
he complex ballet required to move a product, any product, from door to door—and the overload that affects and infects that
dance—begins most often at a port. In the U.S., the leaders for containerized goods are the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Port of New York/Newark, and Savannah, Georgia, followed by Seattle, Virginia, Houston, and Oakland. Their history is the story of transportation overload in microcosm, particularly the Port of Los Angeles, which has become both a cause of system-wide overload and one of its greatest victims.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first cargo ships sailing for San Pedro Harbor on the south side of LA had two options. Their captains could throw up their hands and bypass Los Angeles entirely in favor of the then thriving, now vanished port of Anaheim Landing to the south. Or they could anchor outside the mudflats of San Pedro, unload goods onto small boats, and then row them ashore to waiting horse-drawn wagons. Exports could repeat the process in reverse. It was not a delightful way of doing business.

As soon as the village of Los Angeles showed the least inclination to grow, the inefficiencies and limitations of this infrastructure-free method became intolerable and the demand for more capacity irresistible. Small piers were built in the natural harbor beneath the Palos Verdes Peninsula. This induced a few more ships to come calling on San Pedro with bigger loads, and soon larger piers had to be constructed. Commerce grew further, as did the opportunity for profit, which is when the enterprising Delaware native who founded the new California port town of Wilmington, Phineas Banning, began the first of many efforts to dredge harbor channels to accommodate even larger ships seeking to do business in LA. This is when Banning also began laying plans, then rails, to link the port with downtown by train.

Soon the demands of commerce in a rapidly growing city overloaded those accommodations, too, and the simple piers evolved into massive wooden wharves built with a graceful curve
so the longest portion of the docks paralleled the coastline, enabling far longer piers with more berths without jutting far into the shipping lanes. Then, when the cargo moving across those extended wharves became too heavy to move by hand or horse, train tracks were laid on the piers, with steam engines pulling boxcars laden with goods and grains to and from the loading zones. Those mechanized wharves drew even more ships, creating a shortage of protected warehouse space, yet another problem of overload to solve. In 1917, the prospering city responded by building Municipal Warehouse No. 1, a six-story concrete behemoth, then the largest warehouse west of Chicago and the most visible seaside structure on the West Coast for many years. Approaching ships could navigate by sighting that tall squarish building before anything else at the port was visible. It quickly became a center of activity and commerce in California, an object of fascination for its size and the port's engine of growth for decades, a pinnacle of induced demand.

Three thousand piles were driven into the bedrock for Municipal Warehouse No. 1's foundation in order to support the 27,000 cubic yards of cement and 1,200 tons of reinforcing steel. The three-and-a-half-foot-thick walls yielded a building with a controlled climate year-round without air-conditioning. The warehouse cost $475,000 ($9.5 million in 2014 dollars) to build, with twelve acres of storage space and sixteen electric hoists serving those six floors. The ground floor boasted the killer feature: multiple rail lines running through the center in a recessed bed with concrete platforms on either side—a subway station for freight, with room for twenty-four boxcars unloaded entirely inside the warehouse.

For most of the twentieth century, Municipal Warehouse No. 1 served as the only bonded warehouse at the port, the landmark where everything from gold bullion to circus elephants to the rail
coach that carried Winston Churchill to his grave ended up after arriving at the port. In the 1950s, the interior of this singular warehouse was designated as its own foreign trade zone for duty-free imports and re-exports, which made stepping inside the building the legal equivalent of leaving the country.

More than any other facility at the port, this warehouse and its unrivaled capacity put Los Angeles on the map as a center for global trade, relieving overload for years while accommodating a growing port and a growing city. Only the rise of containerization put an end to Municipal Warehouse No. 1's dominant role in cargo commerce on the West Coast, and although its retro-cool interior is used to this day for storage, its most prized role now is as a convenient set for Hollywood filmmakers. The ground-floor railroad tracks and concrete platforms are fairly easily dressed up as a convincing New York City subway station, close enough to every major Hollywood studio to limit crew costs to day rates, no overnights required. (The port is regularly used for various film backgrounds; the Mediterranean-style hacienda and palm tree–studded grounds of the Coast Guard commander's house on Terminal Island is another favorite, figuring prominently in a number of movies, including standing in for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in
A Few Good Men
.)

Even after the rise of open-air container yards over bulk warehouses, the giant building's height kept it in use for many more years to meet another sort of rising demand at the port: the demand for information. The warehouse's high roof and vantage served as the first and most enduring home for the Marine Exchange and its all-important Master Queuing List.

This critical starting point in the goods-movement system evolved with the same pattern of demand and overload as every other major component in the door-to-door world. In the early 1900s, messenger boys were posted on hilltops overlooking the
port, where they could watch out for approaching cargo ships. They'd try to identify incoming ships by the names marked on their hulls or, failing that, by the rigging of sailing vessels or by markings on the smokestacks of steamships. Once a ship was spotted and at least tentatively identified, the runners would then race back to the shipping agents who employed them, who then would compete with one another to dispatch pilots, tugboat captains, and stevedores to meet the new arrival. Running boys were soon augmented with men on horseback to speed the process.

By 1920 the inefficiency of having dozens of runners and riders racing (and sabotaging) one another on the hilltops near the port, then showing up at the office mere moments before a ship arrived, became untenable. A shipping agent and local customhouse broker came up with the solution when he founded the precursor of the modern Marine Exchange, which he called the Maritime Exchange and Sailing Club. W. H. Wickersham got permission to station lookouts atop the best dockside vantage point available, the roof of Municipal Warehouse No. 1, closer and better than any hilltop. His spotters, all experienced mariners—many of them retired Navy and Coast Guard signalmen—had telescopes on the rooftop to spot the incoming vessels. Once they made a sighting, they had flags and semaphore lights for communicating with the ship crews, and megaphones to shout the information down to coworkers on the ground, who would spread the word to all the port players onshore to prepare for a new arrival. As the ships passed close by, the lookouts would shout berth instructions through the megaphones to the crew.