April marks two important anniversaries for the Bay Area. San Francisco is pulling out all the stops for the first one, the centennial anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake. The second anniversary, however, while equally important in terms of the effect it had on both the region’s landscape and its economy, is unlikely to be met with the same level of fanfare.
Oakland’s dot on the map, nothing made it bigger, quicker, than McLean’s boxes.
By Bill Picture
Published: March, 2006
April marks two important anniversaries for the Bay Area. San Francisco is pulling out all the stops for the first one, the centennial anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake. The second anniversary, however, while equally important in terms of the effect it had on both the region’s landscape and its economy, is unlikely to be met with the same level of fanfare.
Fifty years ago next month, the first container ship sailed from New Jersey to Texas. No one knew it at the time, presumably, not even the so-called father of containerization, Sea-Land Corporation founder Malcom McLean. But this method of shipping cargo inside huge metal boxes, as opposed to stowing cargo loose in a ship’s hold, the way it had been done for centuries, would revolutionize the shipping industry and, eventually, help shape the entire Bay Area region.
Two years later, Matson Navigation Company, which, at the time, was based in San Francisco, loaded its first container ship in Alameda bound for Honolulu. Again, this hardly seemed noteworthy, much less history-making, at the time. But the eventual relocation of bulk cargo activity from San Francisco’s northern waterfront to the then-emerging Port of Oakland can be directly traced to this maiden voyage.
It’s easy to see why container shipping would eventually replace the traditional break-bulk method. First of all, packaging the cargo inside containers made it easier, faster, safer and cheaper to load and unload ships. It took a crew an hour to load less than one ton using the traditional method. That figure increased nearly seven-fold using the container method, which involves using large cranes to load and unload the metal boxes from a ship.
This meant that a ship’s time in port was dramatically reduced, which, in turn, meant a ship could make more trips in less time.
Ships could also now carry significantly more cargo. According to Matson, before containerization, the average commercial vessel could hold about 10,000 tons. Container vessels, on the other hand, could easily hold four-times that amount.
More trips in less time and carrying more cargo resulted in a huge drop in shipping costs, helping put goods and products from overseas manufacturers within the budgets of American consumers. Globalization, as it would later be deemed, was underway.
There was a hitch in the plan, though, at least for San Francisco. The City, the Bay Area’s busiest cargo port at the time, didn’t have open space for the container yards, where the containers are stored temporarily before being re-loaded onto trucks and trains. Oakland, however, had plenty of room to spare.
By the mid-1960s, the lion’s share of the cargo business had moved to Oakland, which, under the direction of Chief Executive Officer, Ben E. Nutter, had built a sprawling, 140-acre terminal to accommodate container business. That terminal, would later be renamed after Nutter, who is credited with converting Oakland into a container port.
Some might see this as a missed opportunity for the City of San Francisco, but port officials there prefer a more glass-half-full take on their predecessors’ decision to let Oakland have container cargo.
The Port of San Francisco’s Director of Maritime, Peter Dailey, believes that container shipping’s headquartering in Oakland allowed the region’s six remaining ports to focus on better serving other aspects of the industry.
Each of the ports plays an important role in the [Bay Area’s] economic well-being, he explains. The Ports of Stockton and Sacramento serve the agricultural interests of the valley, Benicia handles auto imports, the Port of Richmond [serves] the oil refineries…and Redwood City handles shiploads of cement and building aggregates for the construction industry.
San Francisco, Dailey boasts, has the most varied maritime business portfolio of any U.S. port. In addition to owning one of the largest floating drydocks on the west coast of the Americas, San Francisco is also home to the region’s commercial fishing industry and the harbor service industry. It’s also the regional port of call for the passenger cruise lines.
What Dailey very diplomatically neglected to mention is that San Francisco also boasts one of the prettiest and most resident-friendly waterfronts in the Bay Area. While it was, no doubt, hard for city officials in the 1960s to kiss goodbye to the revenue that container shipping promised to generate, they must have recognized the opportunity before them to reclaim San Francisco’s waterfront for residents and visitors to enjoy.
Matson, which relocated to Oakland in 1966, hasn’t any plans for an official celebration of McLean’s maiden container ship voyage. They did, however, cooperate with the authors of two new books that are coming out next month about the effect that containerization had on the shipping industry and the global economy.
Officials at the Port of Oakland say an event to commemorate McLean’s trip is currently in the planning stages, and they tip their hats to his and Matson’s shared vision, one that helped transform their bayside city into a bustling Pacific gateway.
[Matson and Sea-Land] are the cornerstone for this innovation in goods movement, says the Port of Oakland’s Director of Maritime, Wilson Lacy. And Oakland is proud to be a part of that history.
