If you were a sailor homeported in Long Beach in the sixties, or before, you probably remember the floating bridge. It was the gateway to downtown Long Beach from Terminal Island.
Downtown Long Beach, in my humble opinion, was the very best place to be home ported. It had locker clubs, the Pike, and mobs of beautiful California girls. If a cargo ship was heading for the Cerritos Channel, the two halves of the bridge were floated back out of the way and traffic was backed up for ten minutes. About 1970, a new bridge, the Gerald Desmond, the "new bridge", was built to replace the old floater.
Now another bridge is being built to replace the older new bridge. This "new" bridge will have much more vertical clearance to allow the newest cargo ships to pass underneath. Why wont the big ships just enter LA harbor at San Pedro and go under the Commodore Heim bridge to access the terminals on Cerritos Channel you may wonder.
The answer is very simple, they can't. The big green Commodore Heim has been torn down and replaced with a new fixed span with only 41 feet of vertical clearance.
Now, aren't you glad that I cleared everything up?
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