New Alameda Corridor Has Historic Roots

It took about 150 years, but the river-on-wheels that a Los Angeles pioneer once envisioned from the pueblo to the harbor is at last coming true with this Friday’s opening of the $2.4-billion high-speed rail line known as the Alameda Corridor.

The Alameda Corridor will be the new asphalt version of the Los Angeles River, moving cargo back and forth between the port and downtown.

Long before 18-wheelers and freeways, Phineas T. Banning was the “King of Transportation” and “Father of the Los Angeles Harbor,” hauling people and freight along this same route 133 years ago.

He was a pioneer, mule-skinner and entrepreneur. Using his charm, wit and political clout as a state senator, in 1868 he won the right-of-way on a new road called the Dominguez Route--now Alameda Street--and built a 21-mile railway that unlocked the door to Los Angeles’ first business boom. Banning cut major deals and won government contracts to build roads and ship supplies by wagon to posts at Ft. Tejon; Yuma, Ariz.; and Tucson. He opened a rich trade arrangement with Mormon leader Brigham Young that sent hundreds of covered wagons of goods to Salt Lake City.

But it was Banning’s tiny railroad linking the harbor to Los Angeles that eventually lured the Southern Pacific Railroad south, transforming the dusty cow town into a sprawling metropolis.

In 1851, when the Delaware-born, 21-year-old Banning arrived in San Pedro, not much had changed since sailor and author Richard Henry Dana Jr. had declared the boggy area of the harbor “the hell of California.”

Banning saw possibilities in this place and soon became a partner in a fledgling freight-transportation company. His reputation as a businessman grew, as did his prowess for driving a six-horse stagecoach faster, over rougher roads and better than any other driver who cracked the whip.

He cut quite a picture working at the harbor: coatless, without a necktie, sleeves rolled up, wearing pants that stopped six inches short of his ankles and bright red suspenders that would become his trademark.

Cleaned up, he caught the eye of Southerner Rebecca Sanford, whom he married in 1854. She died in 1868 while giving birth to their eighth child.

Months later, he proposed to 22-year-old Mary Hollister, who gave him three more children.

Banning spent much of his time trying to make transportation between the city and the harbor faster, more comfortable and more profitable. Encouraging civic leaders to build a major transportation route between the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys in 1854, he invited potential investors to ride in his stagecoach as he proved that travel was possible over the treacherous route.

But when he reached the top of the mountain pass, the frightened passengers got out. The intrepid Banning set out alone. The stagecoach and horses tumbled down the mountain, a jumble of splinters, chains and panicked animals. Banning emerged from the wreckage saying: “Didn’t I tell you so? Far easier than I thought it would be.”

The group conceded the point and coughed up several thousand dollars. Within a year, in 1855, a wagon train of five 10-mule teams made the trip from Los Angeles to Ft. Tejon in nine days, opening trade between Los Angeles and the north.

In 1857, when a storm ripped apart his San Pedro wharf, Banning bought 640 more acres five miles away to build a new wharf and town.

It was known as Goose Town and soon ridiculed as “Banning’s Hog-Waller,” a place where bulrushes, marshes and sandbars provided a refuge for waterfowl and a paradise for hunters. Using hand pumps and mud scows, Banning sucked away the shallow pools and filled the marshes to build a shipping wharf at the end of what is now Avalon Boulevard. There he carved out a town--five miles closer to Los Angeles than San Pedro--and called it New San Pedro, later renaming it Wilmington, after the capital of his home state.

At the start of the Civil War, the U.S. Army moved south from Ft. Tejon to safeguard the port of Wilmington. On land that Banning donated for the Drum Barracks, the Army processed and trained thousands of volunteers, including a battalion of Mormons. The Mormon volunteers were assigned to live on a small island in the harbor and build barges and tugboats. The 30-acre island became known as Mormon Island, a designation it maintains today, even though it has since been connected to the mainland. Banning wined and dined Army officers, and in so doing won their hauling contracts. “His good nature and his champagne were always on tap,” a friend observed.

For his trouble, he was appointed a brigadier general of the state militia. Although his unit was never called up, his vanity got the better of him and he insisted on being called “General.”

He went on to win two two-year terms to the state Senate beginning in 1865, running for the sole purpose of building Los Angeles’ first railroad.

Public despair and economic collapse set in after the war. Banning sought to pull Los Angeles out of the doldrums and point it in the right direction. He was tired of all the years of nothing but talk of building a railroad, of increased harbor traffic and of more rivals trying to muscle their way into his shipping enterprise.

In 1868, Banning’s railroad bill passed the Legislature and Angelenos approved the $225,000 bond for the S.P. & L.A. Railroad by a 28-vote margin. Banning, a major stockholder in the railroad--a conflict that did not trouble most people at the time--was awarded the construction contract. Only one hurdle remained: whether to lay the north-south tracks east or west of Dominguez Hill, a 175-foot-high landmark now known as the historic Dominguez Adobe Museum, between Alameda Street and Central Avenue in Dominguez Hills.

Banning favored the “Dominguez Route,” drier and not as steep as the marshy “Lake Route” west of the hill. The Lake Route was strongly favored by railroad president and former Gov. John G. Downey, whose ranch it crossed. Banning’s forceful personality won the argument--and made him a bitter enemy in Downey.

The Dominguez Route--later Railroad Avenue, now Alameda Street--was destined to become Los Angeles’ major artery, pulsing with the lifeblood of international trade dollars from across the globe.

On Oct. 26, 1869, more than five months after the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, creating a seamless transcontinental route, Los Angeles’ first railway south of the Tehachapi Mountains opened.

The San Pedro & Los Angeles Railroad carried 1,500 passengers south from the new barn-like Los Angeles Depot at Commercial and Alameda streets to the Dominguez Hill depot and on to Wilmington harbor. On the locomotive, a sign painter lettered “LOS ANGELOS,” an error discovered just in the nick of time for the maiden run.

Setting a tight timetable for two trains a day, Banning charged $2.50 per passenger and $5 a ton for freight. Towns such as Florence, four miles south of downtown, began to sprout up, changing the landscape along the tracks. Alameda and Commercial streets quickly became the industrial center of town.

For more than three years, Banning’s twin engines, “Los Angeles” and “San Pedro,” chugged back and forth. Cowboys made a sport of racing the great iron horse. In 1873, the rail line was used as bait to lure Southern Pacific over the mountains and into Los Angeles.

In 1875, Banning’s dream was realized as Wilmington boomed and the first large seagoing steamer, the Los Angeles, carrying 350 passengers, pulled alongside his wharf in the new deep-water port.

In 1885, the champion of modern transport stepped off a San Francisco streetcar and was run over by a horse-drawn taxicab. Soon after, the “King of Transportation” died at age 55.

Banning’s seaport was eventually absorbed by the Port of Los Angeles, and his railway is now the Alameda Corridor. His legacy is preserved in the desert town of Banning, once a stagecoach stop, and at his 1864 24-room Greek Revival-style mansion and stagecoach barn at the Banning Residence Museum in Wilmington.