Banning later doubled down on his investments, developing the harbor town of Wilmington and overseeing construction of the region's first railroad, the Los Angeles & San Pedro. To bolster his business transporting goods and passengers along the 21-mile route between Los Angeles and the San Pedro shoreline, teamster Phineas Banning dredged a channel through the bay's marshes and built a landing in the 1850s.

Supply ships anchored off San Pedro almost as soon as the Spanish colonized the region, but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Los Angeles began improving its ersatz harbor. San Francisco and San Diego both benefit from fine natural harbors, but topography forced Los Angeles to create its own before improvements, the San Pedro Bay offered only partial shelter from winds and seas, and features like a sandbar in the middle of the bay and mudflats along the shore made the bay less than an ideal site for shipping. Now, as frenzied shoppers fight off the effects of tryptophan in their hunt for sales, explore the story of Southern California's unlikely harbor вЂ“ and how it came to be divided between two cities вЂ“ through selected images from the region's photographic archives. With the combined equivalent of 14 million standard shipping containers moving through San Pedro Bay's harbor each year, it's likely that many of the TVs, toys, and other imported goods sold at deep discount this Black Friday will have passed through the region's twin seaports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Union Bank is a proud sponsor of Lost LA.

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