Hella Town by Mitchell Schwarzer

Author:Mitchell Schwarzer [Schwarzer, Mitchell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), Historical Geography, Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9780520381124
Google: NAQwEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2021-09-28T01:11:36+00:00

A PIONEERING CONTAINER PORT

On August 31, 1958, the Hawaiian Merchant, a C-3 cargo ship of the Matson Navigation Company, sailed from Alameda to Honolulu with 20 steel containers on board. It was the pioneering passage across the Pacific Ocean.69 Only two years earlier, the first such venture had taken place, when Malcolm McLean’s Ideal X sailed with a load of trailers from Newark to Houston. McLean, owner of McLean Trucking, had come up with the idea of putting truck trailers (their wheels detached) onto an old oil tanker.70 Once the ship reached its destination, the trailers wheels could be easily reattached and pulled by a tractor truck. A transportation revolution was at hand.

For millennia, ships had carried their cargo as either bulk or break bulk. Bulk items included liquids, grains, or other granular items that could be shoveled or poured into the cavernous holds within a ship’s hull. Break bulk—consisting of food items, machines, and consumer goods—was transported in crates, bags, or barrels, and then lifted by cranes, one by one, from the ship to pallets on the quay. There, they were again loaded, individually, onto drays or other vehicles and taken to a warehouse where they were stored on other pallets. From the warehouse other drays took the break-bulk goods to a railcar or truck, where they were transferred yet again for their journey to a wholesaler or, eventually, retailer. Each loading or unloading took a great deal of time and labor. Containerization changed everything. At a factory or warehouse, a batch of goods was packed into a uniform steel box—eight feet in height, eight feet in depth, and in standard lengths of 20, 30, and 40 feet. The goods stayed together in the container through numerous trips and transfers, on both sea and land—reducing theft or damage. Epitomizing the concept of intermodal transport, containers could be rapidly handed off from ships to trucks and trains. Once, it took 160 longshoremen to unload a ship in a week. With containers, 50 workers could do the same job in less than 20 hours.71 Container ships stayed in port for shorter periods and container ports employed fewer longshoremen, generating substantial cost savings for shipping companies.

Instead of being job intensive, instead of providing a substantial, alternative source of employment to the city’s working classes during a time of deindustrialization, container shipping would prove to be capital intensive. It required lightweight yet strong containers, more sophisticated cranes that could handle their weight and accurately set them on truck trailers, and complex logistic operations to coordinate the marshaling of containers.72 It was also land intensive. At a time when industries were abandoning plants up and down Oakland’s waterfront, the viability of the container port depended upon the conversion of bay waters into landfills, vast concrete aprons behind the quays that could support thousands of containers and their related equipment as well as land-based cranes.

In the mid-1950s, the Ideal X and other early ships run by McLean had been equipped with onboard cranes; ports did

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