Things Are Still Shipshape

At the nation’s largest port, few things have weathered the sea longer than Al Larson Boat Shop.

It was opened by a Swedish boat-making clan in 1903, four years before the official founding of the Port of Los Angeles. The San Pedro operation earned its own exhibit at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, which christened it the oldest shipyard in Southern California.

Whether it was Larson at the helm or the family of the retired Los Angeles cop who bought it in 1959, the shipyard navigated every turn in the modern history of the harbor.

As dozens of West Coast competitors foundered and sank, the yard thrived in part because of a decades-old decision to give up shipbuilding.

“We are the last man left standing,” said President Jack Wall, who runs the outfit with his brother George and their 85-year-old mother Gloria, a shipbuilder’s daughter who is chairwoman of the board.

It made the best of whatever Southern California had to offer it -- building wooden vessels for the fishing industry in the early 1900s, minesweepers and patrol boats for the Navy during World War II and better living quarters aboard battleships that were brought out of mothballs and recommissioned during the Reagan administration.

Now, the company repairs almost anything that floats through the nation’s busiest seaport complex: barges, tugboats, fireboats, ferryboats, research vessels and even the occasional tall ship.

The company managed this as the West Coast shipyard industry endured a sharp decline. Dozens of yards once plied the trade.

Now, only one of the eight U.S. yards still capable of building large oceangoing vessels is on the West Coast, according to the Shipbuilders Council of America.

Leaving construction behind was too difficult for most, as years-long Navy contracts gave way to short-term civilian work.

“Over the years, we have mostly seen many shipyards try to shift to repairs and then go out of business,” said Cynthia Brown, president of the American Shipbuilding Assn. “It puts much more pressure on you to find the next order. They did not see enough repair work to sustain themselves.”

Al Larson Boat Shop built its last boat, an 80-foot purse seiner, in the late 1940s. Today, many customers are dependent on it as the only convenient option for large repair and overhaul jobs between San Diego and San Francisco.

“There are a bunch of smaller yacht yards out there, but no one else here has the capacity to take our 250-foot derrick barges,” said Greg “Rocky” Bolin, Southern California equipment manager for Manson Construction Co., which specializes in marine building projects. “I only wish they were bigger and could handle more of our equipment.”

Jack Wall, whose lease with the port also requires him to run a small marina next to the yard, wants to expand. He met recently with port officials to discuss options but said he had made little progress in winning more space in a harbor where cargo is king.

Still, business has been good. The company’s dry dock is booked through June and the shipyard, Jack Wall said, cleared $12.4 million in sales last year, enough to reward its 75 employees with bonuses of $800 to $1,000 at the end of June and at the end of the year.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing. Gloria Wall remembers that the shipyard was “run down to nothing” and had few clients and just five employees when Andy Wall Sr., her husband, bought it.

“It took many years to build it back up. We put every penny that we made back into the yard. That’s how it started to grow,” she said.

That wasn’t surprising, given the family’s history. Jack Wall’s grandfather was a ship’s captain from Denmark. The framed captain and pilot licenses still line Wall’s office. Wall’s late father was a police officer for nine years, before he too came back.

“We’ve got water in our blood. We can’t get it out,” Jack Wall, 59, said.

The tradition may be continuing. Jack Wall’s 28-year-old son Jeff works at the company as a troubleshooter on customer orders and environmental compliance and 27-year-old daughter Heather tends to clerical duties part time.

“Family members down here don’t stray too far from the harbor,” Jack said.

The shipyard has its problems.

It sits in cramped surroundings in the polluted Fish Harbor section of Terminal Island -- pollution that Wall acknowledges the yard helped create over the years, in part because it is unable to haul ships completely away from the water to work on them.

As a result, the finely ground copper slag it uses to blast away old paint and rust on the hulls of vessels, which are suspended partly over water, ends up fouling that section of the harbor.

That keeps it constantly in the crosshairs of Santa Monica Baykeeper, an environmental group.

“There is a huge problem at the site. Fish Harbor is very polluted directly from the [shipyard] site, among others,” said Tracy Egoscue, the organization’s executive director.

Egoscue said that the copper and other pollution at the site must be cleaned up. But she said that her group supported Wall’s efforts to get more land that would allow him to haul vessels farther out of the water.

“It makes sense if you have someone who wants to stay to help them clean it up and keep them rather than lose the last boat shop in the harbor,” Egoscue said.

Ralph Appy, director of environmental management for the Port of Los Angeles, said that officials were looking at both short- and long-term solutions for contaminated sediment removal from Fish Harbor and for getting the repair yard the space it needed to be able to remove vessels completely from the water.

Al Larson Boat Shop is vital to the port’s operations, he said. “Having the ability to fix boats is something we need to maintain here in the harbor, but we need to make sure that it is done correctly.”

The shipyard’s gray corrugated steel buildings sit on two acres fronting South Seaside Avenue in San Pedro, across the street from the last local competitor for medium-sized commercial vessel business, Southwest Marine, which closed its harbor facilities in June. Out in the yard where the work takes place, rusted rows of railroad tracks extend into the water. There is a series of steel cables and powerful winches that can haul vessels as big as 900 tons from the water.

On a recent day, several decades of boating history were receiving attention.

Among the vessels was the Challenger, an 85-foot fireboat belonging to the Long Beach Fire Department.

It was in for complete retrofit, scheduled to take 2 1/2 months.

Nearby was the Argos, an 80-year-old two-masted brig owned by the Boy Scouts of America and still used to teach scouts how tall ships operate.

Both vessels were out of the water, perched on worn tacks of wood called bilge blocks. Chalk marks circled dents and dings in Argos’ aging wooden hull, where planks would be caulked or replaced.

Among the vessels the company has worked on was John Wayne’s yacht Wild Goose, a World War II minesweeper that was converted into a private yacht for the actor.

The company has no plans to return to shipbuilding or to move into the lucrative business of working on private yachts, the latter of which does not fit with the boat shop’s traditions, Wall said.

“We’re a commercial yard.... We do the dirty work, not the shave and the haircut,” Wall said. “We try to focus on what we do best.”