Marina del Rey: The Largest Artificial Harbor in the Country

In nineteen sixty, the place you are passing did not exist. It was the Ballona Wetlands: a brackish coastal marsh fed by Ballona Creek, one of the last significant wetland ecosystems on the Los Angeles coastline, a gathering and fishing site for Tongva people for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived.

Between nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty-five, contractors dredged three million cubic yards of soil from that marsh and used it to create the eight hundred twenty acres of Marina del Rey. The project had been authorized by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in nineteen fifty-three and designed by a master planner named Victor Gruen. When it was formally dedicated on April tenth, nineteen sixty-five, it was the largest artificial small-craft harbor in the United States.

It remains so today. Roughly five thousand boats are berthed here at any given time. The marina generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually in economic activity. By every metric the nineteen fifty-three authorization was meant to satisfy, it succeeded.

What it displaced is now a smaller question than what it once was, because most of the Ballona Wetlands were displaced before the marina was built, by earlier draining and development going back to the early twentieth century. What remains of the original wetlands, immediately north of the marina, is now the subject of a major ecological restoration effort that has been planned, debated, and partially funded for decades. The marsh is trying to come back. The harbor is not moving.