Looking out southwards from the Bulb, one can see silhouettes of the tall white container cranes dotting the harbor of the Port of Oakland. The port, now among the busiest in the United States, rose to prominence in the 1960s by taking advantage of container shipping. This mass movement of material goods left impacts on East Bay land and labor that persist today.

Shipping used to be slow and expensive. At the basis of all freight movement were the waterfront longshoremen manually handling heavy cargo under harsh working conditions. Since docks were highly dependent on this physical labor, the workers formed solidarity in unions; on the west coast it was the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).

Malcolm McLean, a trucker in the 1950s, realized that he could cut costs by directly transferring trailers from his trucks’ chassis onto ships, where the cargo could travel free of traffic, and having other trucks pickup the trailers once the ships docked. He claimed that this method, melding two traditionally separate transportation modes, would cut down loading times from 60 hours to a mere four. In 1956, the Ideal-X, his first container ship, set his plans in motion from Newark, New Jersey.

Meanwhile in the Bay Area, Matson, a San Francisco-based steamship company, was planning on expediting their operations with containerization as well. Trailmobile Inc manufactured the containers at their Berkeley factory with aluminum supplied by Kaiser, which allowed the Hawaiian Merchant to set sail from Todd Shipyard in Alameda. In 1959, Pacific Coast Engineering Company (later Paceco) installed the first high-speed cranes built for Matson at Encinal Terminals in Alameda. 

In 1962, the Port of Oakland’s container terminals were jump-started when Sea-Land Service, McLean’s company, chose the port as a prime intercoastal terminal. A few years later, to supply forces during the Vietnam War, the U.S. Armed Forces also embraced containerization. Containerization further boomed when Matson, the “second largest container carrier on the West Coast,” also moved base to Oakland.

However, this growth was not without conflict; the ILWU, for fear of losing cargo handling jobs to containerization and technologies like cranes, striked for decades. Matson data collected over three years states that over 3,900 lay days, or days in which a ship is in port, were lost because of strikes. This rising tension culminated in the ILWU Strike of 1971, the longest in the union’s history as dockers fought for job security from the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), their employers. 96% of the ILWU voted for the strike, which consisted of over 15,000 longshoremen, and they halted all west coast ports for 130 days, costing the Pacific Coast states over $1.7 billion dollars (more than $11.1 billion dollars today). Finally, after months of impasse, hostility, and compromise, the ILWU agreed to a settlement from the PMA that promised a steady income for registered longshoremen, but for only a decade. Although the longshoremen eventually received a favorable settlement, the ILWU strike only helped prove the innovation of containers. Because west coast ports closed, companies found that they could instead ship goods to the U.S. by trucking them from Canadian and Mexican ports; thus, the containerization of goods easily enabled international trade and globalization at the expense of all longshoremen. 

The cost of the growth of the Port of Oakland also had other consequences. Postwar West Oakland had quickly become the center of the Black community in the East Bay, but it was not to last. Oakland’s white leaders heavily encouraged regional development to create the “Metropolitan Oakland Area,” calling to deindustrialize Oakland and instead support surrounding cities like Fremont, Milpitas, and San Leandro, drastically hurting Oakland’s economy. West Oakland was hit hard; first, urban renewal occurred in 1959, in which entire communities were bulldozed in a tabula rasa fashion to make room for redevelopment. 10,000 housing units were destroyed in less than 10 years. At the time, West Oakland’s population was almost completely Black. The community and culture of West Oakland was denied from ever recovering because of BART development, which cut through West Oakland and whose fill was used to build the container terminals, surrounding highway development, and nearby port containerization developments.

From Albany Bulb, the harborscape of the Port of Oakland can be clearly seen. Large rocky chunks of steel slag, the physical byproduct of steelmaking for shipping containers, are passed while walking along the Bulb. The proof of containerization at the Port of Oakland can be seen here physically, but its history makes clear the diminutization of longshoremen labor and effects on Black communities. 

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Header image: Container cranes at the Port of Oakland, 2018. Image from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Magic Box

With this mural, we are bringing the phenomenon of container shipping to an understandable scale to encourage conversation and thought about the topic. This global shipping technology has fundamentally changed our ways of life; goods now travel across the world at faster speeds and greater quantities than ever before. However, many local communities were displaced as containers replaced port jobs. Our mural asks you to remember the reverberations of the development of container shipping.

We installed this mosaic of a steel shipping container on the mural. When you are at the Bulb, if you scan the mosaic with the Artivive app on your phone, a short historical video will play. 

You can see video here by clicking on the image of the mosaic.

Videos from the Prelinger Archive and the Oakland Public Library’s Oakland History Room under fair use. Photos courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland.