Models and artifacts tell story of ships from sails to nuclear power.

The luxury liner RMS Titanic sank 76 years ago today after striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage. Pictures taken by recent American and French expeditions provided a glimpse of what is left of the wreck in the depths of the North Atlantic.

But if you want to know what the millionaire-laden liner looked like before its loss made it a legend, visit the Los Angeles Maritime Museum alongside the main Los Angeles Harbor channel in San Pedro.

The ship is there--in miniature, of course--as an 18-foot-long model that Roberto Pirrone spent 5 1/2 years and 4,000 hours creating during the 1970s when he was a teen-ager in Monterey Park.

After inspecting the black and white, four-funnel superstructure, visitors can walk to the other side that is cut away and view the minute detail of the ship’s interior--the grand staircase with its glass dome, the luxurious first-class lounge, a variety of furnished staterooms, from posh to plain, and the vast innards where boilers and engines powered the ship.

“We opened this museum in 1979 with the Titanic and a few other borrowed items,” Director William Lee said. Almost a decade later, there are so many artifacts that Lee says he is running out of room and hopes to expand his exhibit space.

“We get constant donations of artifacts and ship models,” he said. “We have an embarrassment of riches.”

The emphasis is on models, and 300 of them--from vintage sailing vessels to nuclear-powered warships--are spread throughout the large, two-level museum. The museum occupies a building that housed the municipal ferry system, which ran between San Pedro and Terminal Island until 1963.

The old ferry days have not entirely disappeared. The equipment used to raise and lower the ramp to the boat is still there, and a sign still warns that it is fraudulent to use slugs in place of the dime that was required for the short ride across the channel.

The museum also has authentic fishing boats and dugout canoes. A replica of the Golden Hinde, the ship of 16th-Century buccaneer Sir Francis Drake, will be moored outside for a month beginning May 19, Lee said.

Banners, flags and paintings of ships, plus the trappings of the sea--from antique bowsprits to ships’ wheels to shiny brass plates identifying vessels--are found by the hundreds. Many photographs depict a century of change in San Pedro and the harbor.

One exhibit case honors the 1933 visit to San Pedro of Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution of War of 1812 fame. (Lee says the ship may come back in 1992.) Another commemorates what Lee describes as the greatest peacetime disaster ever to hit the Navy, when nine ships in a task force went on the rocks at Point Honda near Lompoc in 1923 due to a navigational error. Seven ships sank, and 20 lives were lost.

Overlooking what used to be the mooring dock for the ferry is a reconstruction of the bridge of the USS Los Angeles, a heavy cruiser built in 1945 with money from war bonds sold in Los Angeles. It was one of the first ships damaged in the Korean War and was saw service off Vietman before being scrapped in 1977. It is the centerpiece in the room dedicated to 20th-Century warships.

“The museum is devoted to the history of ships and seafaring and a cultural history of human adaptation to the sea,” said Lee, an anthropologist who has been museum director for two years. In addition to local waters, the Pacific Rim--which Lee calls the focus of the next century--provides a theme for the collection.

Nearly 85,000 people a year visit the museum, which is maintained by the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department. Although many major ports have maritime museums--San Francisco, Seattle, Rotterdam and Stockholm among them--the Los Angeles museum is distinctive for its location on a major harbor channel, where passing ships and sea birds provide a backdrop to the maritime exhibits, Lee said.

Conversations on harbor radio frequencies are piped into the museum to lend authenticity. And amateur radio enthusiasts operate a marine radio station in a glassed-in room. “They talk to the whole world,” Lee said.