Great American cities and water

[badrunner]

Yeah, arguing about when LA touched the coast is one of those silly "city limits" games that people like to play here. It was clearly a coastal city way before then. In the late 1800s, long before LA annexed San Pedro, there were trains driving right up on to the piers in Santa Monica and Redondo Beach, loading and unloading cargo from oceangoing ships. The LA area was really a series of small port cities, before all shipping was consolidated into the LA/Long Beach port complex.