#170: San Pedro Municipal Ferry Building (San Pedro)

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 12, 1996

I’ve long been fascinated by airports, train stations, bus stops, those transportation hubs where people congregate with the purpose of going somewhere else. How do you create an inviting destination in a place intended for transience? And what happens when it’s no longer needed? LA’s first commercial airport, the Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, was turned into an industrial park and later restored as part of Disney’s creative campus. The historic Subway Terminal Building downtown, once the main station for the Pacific Electric Railway, is now luxury apartments. We’ve seen old streetcar depots retooled as coffee shops, languishing in disrepair or caught in development hell. The old substation that used to power Pasadena’s trolley cars now serves as a Mennonite thrift shop.

The preservationist in me wishes that more of these phased-out transportation hubs would follow the lead of the old Municipal Ferry Building in San Pedro. For 21 years it served as the main point of departure for workers and vehicles heading to Terminal Island, an important center for fishing, shipbuilding and Naval life in the heart of the Port of LA. Today it’s the largest maritime museum on the west coast, devoted to telling the story of the people and industries that the Port has supported throughout its history.

Terminal Island is a largely industrial, man-made island that was built in the late 20th century on an empty wetland between San Pedro and Wilmington, and expanded in subsequent decades. As early as 1906, a thriving community of Japanese-American fishermen lived and worked on the island (back then it was known as Rattlesnake Island), catching sardines and later tuna. They were soon joined by a steam station for Southern California Edison, and later on a Ford assembly plant.

Before World War II, there was a private ferry service at the bottom of 6th Street, on the San Pedro side of the channel. But the growing industrial economy of the Port of LA required a more robust ferry service, especially as World War II ramped up. By 1942, Terminal Island housed the Navy’s Pacific Fleet and a Naval air station, two major shipyards and the world’s largest collection of canneries. Sadly, even as the fishing industry flourished, the Japanese-American community that built it up was forced off Terminal Island during the war. Once President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, they were forcibly relocated to the Manzanar internment camp, their homes and shrines on the island razed by the Navy.

Municipal Ferry Building, 1944 (Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection / Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)

The City of Los Angeles took over the old private ferry service in 1941, and got to work building the new ferry terminal that same year, with assistance from the Public Works Administration. As it happened, they were helped out by developments going on up the coast. A lot of big cities were moving away from ferry service, and replacing them with bridges across major bays, or from islands to mainlands. LA was able to buy its San Pedro ferry, the Islander, second-hand from a system operating in Puget Sound near Seattle. And the ramps and “lifting rams” that brought cars onto the ferry? That was purchased from San Francisco, which didn’t need its Treasure Island ferry anymore after completing the Bay Bridge. According to an LA Times article from late July 1941, ferry service began August 8, 1941, well before the new building was completed.

The building itself is one of the few remaining structures around the Port reflecting the architectural tastes of the early 20th century. Designed by Derwood Lydell Irvin of the LA Harbor Department, it’s a quirky streamline moderne confection, 70,000 square feet of blocky, asymmetrical masses with those signature curved (and fluted!) corners to soften the edges. If you look at it right, the old Ferry Building resembles a cruise ship, especially with its current stripey paint job. The inside was (and still is) divided into three main sections. To the north, you had office space. To the south was the main waiting room and a cafe, plus a long curving ramp that led to another waiting room and a series of walkways. In the center was a five-story octagonal tower that housed the vehicle ramps and lifting rams. Back in the day, a passthrough just underneath the tower would let the cars through to the ferry side.

The Islander ferry, 1956 (UCLA Library Department of Special Collections)

From 1942-1963, the Municipal Ferry Building was the turnstile for some 7 million passengers and 70,000 vehicles headed across the channel to Terminal Island. It was a tight system: the Municipal Ferry Building was located at the end of a Pacific Red Car Line, so commuters could step off the trolley, pay their fare, take a three-minute ferry ride to a smaller building on the Terminal Island side, and be at work. At their height, the Islander ferry and its companion the Ace would shuttle passengers every 15 minutes, all day long. Cannery workers, shipbuilders, sailors shipping off to war in the Pacific theater – they all passed through this building.

Things changed at Terminal Island after WWII. With the war machine no longer operating at full steam, the shipyards transitioned to dismantling the Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Fishing was still big business, though even that eventually dried up by the ‘80s, when the island’s last cannery closed.

Vincent Thomas Bridge, 1963 (Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)

Ultimately, ferry service to Terminal Island succumbed to the same steady march of technological progress that brought the Islander to LA in the first place. Service continued until late 1963, when the Vincent Thomas Bridge opened just up the channel. That made the ferry system obsolete, and also technically illegal, as California law prohibits a ferry within a mile of a public toll bridge. The Islander and Ace were sold and later scrapped.

The Municipal Ferry Building enjoyed a comfortable retirement for 12 years in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The LA Harbor Department continued operating out of its north wing. The Army Corps of Engineers was based here for a spell, and for years a water taxi company rented out the dock. When the Harbor Department moved in 1975, some feared that the building would meet the wrecking ball, like its sister on the Terminal Island side. But a grassroots effort by San Pedro locals was able to secure city funding to transform the building into the Los Angeles Maritime Museum. It opened its doors in January of 1980, and it’s still going strong today.

Original lens from the Los Angeles Harbor Lighthouse, aka “Angels Gate Light,” built in 1913
Diorama of the inside of a nuclear submarine

This really is a terrific museum, full of artifacts from every imaginable facet of seafaring, from model ships to old diving suits, glittering lighthouse lenses to a diorama of a nuclear submarine’s insides. There’s a moving exhibit that tells the story of the Japanese-Americans that once lived in Terminal Island’s “Fish Harbor.”

Also important for this landmark hunter: a lot was preserved in the remodel. While the passthrough has been enclosed, the massive lifting ram apparatus from San Francisco is still there, as is the original “Entrance” sign. On your way to the second-floor galleries, you’ll walk up the same interior ramps that passengers used to. They even used the same font to spell out “Los Angeles Maritime Museum” on the facade as they did for the original “Municipal Ferry” lettering. In both the stuff it covers and the way it has evolved as a building, the Los Angeles Maritime Museum feels visually and spiritually connected to the building’s origins as the San Pedro Municipal Ferry Building.