The Monolith: Los Angeles Municipal Warehouse Number One

Let’s visit a bit of historic Los Angeles architecture. It’s a spot you almost certainly will never see in person, no matter how many times you come here. It’s far from any tourist itinerary, and merely a footnote in L.A. history, although an interesting one.

I’ve written previously about the origin of the Port of Los Angeles: click this link for one story. Approximately 20% of all cargo entering the U.S. now goes through the port of Los Angeles. It’s the busiest container shipping port in the United States.

At the beginning of the “contact period” in the 16th century, as Europeans came to North America, they named the port San Pedro Bay. European exploring ships had been arriving there since 1542, when Juan Cabrillo, scouting the coast for Spain, discovered the harbor. Here’s a full-sized replica of his ship, San Salvador, docked for a visit in the Port of Los Angeles. I wrote about Cabrillo’s voyage at this link.

As Los Angeles grew, the harbor became an important base for shipping and fishing. Dredging deepened the channels, and civic leaders built a breakwater to protect it from storms and waves. Here’s the 1890 breakwater, 130 years after its construction. The entrance to the harbor, on the left, is called Angels Gate.

In 1914, L.A.’s civic leaders were aware that the new Panama Canal was due to open. At port cities along the west coast of the U.S., there was anticipation of an upturn in the volume and frequency of trade from around the world.

If there’s a harbor or riverfront in any town you know, from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon; Savannah, Georgia to San Diego, you know that a core element of waterborne commerce was warehouses. Warehouses lined the banks of towns along the Mississippi, the Ohio, and every ocean bay, port or inlet across the continent. Goods came off a ship, were held in warehouses, then were trans-shipped by rail, mule or went back onto another ship.

If Los Angeles was going to compete for a large share of the expected increase in ocean traffic from the new canal, it needed a big warehouse.

They built a very big warehouse: Municipal Warehouse Number One.

When it opened in 1917, Warehouse One was estimated to be the largest structure on the continent west of Chicago. 480 feet (150 M) long, 150 feet (46 M) wide, six floors, built with 27,000 cubic yards of concrete, reinforced by 1,200 tons of steel.

One construction challenge few non-engineers think about is how much a structure weighs. 27,000 cubic yards of concrete and those tons of steel represent something on the order of 56,000 tons of weight, before any freight went into the warehouse. The land it sits on is rubble fill, placed there to extend the reach of the port’s main channel. Setting that amount of weight on potentially unstable land required 3,000 pilings to be sunk into the fill to support the warehouse. As a testament to the designers’ skill, the warehouse survived the massive Long Beach earthquake that destroyed hundreds of nearby buildings in 1933.

The photographer standing left of center in the photo below gives you some sense of the immense scale of the structure.

Freight Transportation

In 1917, large cargo loads were carried primarily by ship or rail. A huge wharf occupied the edge of the main channel, about 50 meters from the warehouse (to the left of the photo above, although the wharf no longer exists).  Much of the cargo moving in and out of Warehouse One went directly to and from ships at the wharf. Other cargo came and went via rail. Locomotives could pull directly into the warehouse, through the ground-level portal on the left of the photo below. The rails are still there, although no longer used. A locomotive pulled its load straight into the warehouse to be loaded or unloaded. Freight went to the upper floors via a series of hoists and elevators inside.

Details

As design, a warehouse is simply an extremely large box. The most significant external details of Warehouse One are the four cast concrete fire escapes on each facade.

The builders, however, promised the structure would have detailing that would add aesthetic appeal.

The photos above show the classic Doric pilasters, which suggest that they’re holding up the building. They are not. They’re decoration, molded into the formed concrete walls, as are the lines of the cornice, which projects about six feet above the level of the roof.

There’s one interesting bit of detail.

Those figures are a page the architect stole from designers of older massive structures. Any building on that scale has to accommodate the amount of water that falls on a roof. Even in dry southern California, seasonal winter rain can fall at the rate of an inch per hour. On a roof of 70,000 square feet, an inch of rain represents 10,000 gallons of water.

If you need to project water off a large structure, add gargoyles to your building. In this case, molded lion heads:

Nothing Lasts Forever

Municipal Warehouse Number One is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That status makes it an extremely difficult thing to get rid of, even if it’s outlived its usefulness. You only have to spend 30 seconds looking at the sheer mass of the structure to get a sense of how very seriously one would want to do something else on that spot to start thinking about what’s required to pull it down and cart away 56,000 tons of concrete and steel.

That said, Warehouse One has outlived itself. As long as 50 years ago, in the 1970s, the onset of containerized freight and “intermodal” shipping started diminishing the usefulness of Warehouse One, along with countless thousands of other warehouses, from Portland to Portland, Savannah to San Diego, and everywhere in between.

Today, enormous gantry cranes lift 40-foot containers off ships at a rate of about one every two minutes.

The containers are loaded onto specially designed trucks or railroad cars, and distributed across the continent. This is the just-in-time world: No warehouses need apply.

Warehouse One is mostly vacant, all but derelict. Below, the photographer contemplates how she’ll capture the immense pile facing her.

If your cruise ship enters the Port of Los Angeles, you’ll see Warehouse One, including the water tower atop the building.

That water tower’s an original feature from 1917. It supplies water pressure for the internal fire suppression system — sprinklers — a forward-thinking bit of design from more than a century ago.

Painted on it: “Welcome,” in multiple languages, including Italian, Japanese and Croatian, a nod to the thousands of Italian, Japanese and Croatian immigrants who worked in San Pedro — many of them fishermen — whose descendants still live in the harbor area.

ようこそ. Bienvenidos. Dobro Došli. Welcome to Los Angeles.

Is there an old row of waterfront warehouses in your town? Or are they all gone? Please make a comment.

© Brad Nixon 2020 Water tower photo © M. Vincent, 2020, used by generous permission.