The stories of the peoples that lived on Terminal Island is now being told in a new book Terminal Island, Lost Communities on America’s Edge by USC Price School’s Geraldine Knatz, with co-author Naomi Hirahara, with a foreword by USC’s William Deverell and an afterword by actor George Takai.  

Today it’s a largely man-made land mass that is home to massive container terminals, huge cranes, ships and heavy-duty trucks.  Few people can imagine that the Island was once home to thriving communities. Terminal Island was home to residential communities for 70 years, including a refuge for artists writers, scientists and wealthy Angeleno’s who built their summer homes on the surf’s edge. Others moved there to work in the fishing, lumber or cannery industries or in the Island’s hotels and bathhouses. For a period of 70 years, these communities evolved as the forces of port expansion pushed people aside for harbor expansion. The final blow to all residents came after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 declaring military zones along the West Coast, paving the way for incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans. The U.S. Navy had federal authority to order all residents off of the island, Japanese and non-Japanese, within 48 hours. 

The island began as not more than a sand bar, a long narrow spit of land emanating from the mouth of the San Gabriel River into San Pedro Bay. Not substantial enough to even deserve a mention in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, unlike Deadman’s Island, a tall promontory holding the bones of sailor and soldiers. Known as Rattlesnake Island, the sandy bar stayed that way until the 1870s when the US Army Engineers started construction of rock breakwater connecting Deadman’s with Rattlesnake Island. The Army’s goal was to narrow the opening to the harbor, hoping that the surf would scour out a deeper channel. It worked but the breakwater also allowed sand build up along the rocks creating more land which enterprising individuals thought was good for living on..The first settlers on Rattlesnake Island were army engineers and hermit fishermen. Without running water and needing a boat for access, the area only attracted day visitors, ocean bathers and naturalists who like to collect shells. 

All that changed in 1891 when the Terminal Railway Company purchased the island from the heirs of the Dominguez family. Their long-term strategy was to compete with the Southern Pacific Railroad that already had access to the harbor in San Pedro. In the short-term, however, the Terminal Railway created a resort community and Angeleno’s built huge summer homes on the surf in newly created communities of Brighton Beach and Terminal. Meanwhile an electric community of artists, writers, fisherman and scientists took up residence along the land created by the Army Corps in the community known as East San Pedro. 

As the Port of Los Angeles began to fill the water around the island to make more land, the waterfront mansions were no longer on the beach. Now they were a mile from the water’s edge. The owners sold those homes, and many were converted to boarding houses for Terminal Island’s workforce. Meanwhile, the need to create a land and water area for one of Los Angeles’ most important industries, fisheries, required the eviction of the squatters in East San Pedro. The fish canneries build company housing for their work force, Japanese and Japanese American families. Other Japanese leased land from the Port for their businesses and shops, making the Japanese fishing village a complete community with a school and a Shinto shrine.  

And then came WWII and a policy that decimated the dreams and families of the Japanese Village. Today all that remains is a memorial to the Fisherman’s village and if you look hard enough, the former Nakamura grocery store, boarded up on Tuna Street, once the main street of the Japanese fisherman’s village.