Marina del Rey is an affluent seaside community in Los Angeles County in California. A Westside locale, the population is at 9,000. Fisherman’s Village offers a view of Marina del Rey’s dominant feature, the Marina, the world’s largest man-made small craft harbor with 19 marinas with capacity for 5,300 boats and is home port to approximately 6,500 boats. The harbor, the Los Angeles Times said in 1997, is “perhaps the county’s most valuable resource”. The marina itself, a specially designed harbor with moorings for pleasure craft and small boats, is surrounded by high-rise condos, hotels, apartments, shops, and restaurants. The area also includes the University of Southern CaliforniaInformation Sciences Institute and the UCLA Marina Aquatic Center.
Marina del Rey is southeast of the L.A. City community of Venice and north of the L.A. City community of Playa del Rey, near the mouth of Ballona Creek. It is located four miles (6 km) north of Los Angeles International Airport. It is bounded on all sides by the City of Los Angeles. The beach-style homes, the strip of land against the beach, and the beach itself, west of the harbor, are within the City of Los Angeles limits, but share the same zip code as Marina del Rey. The name of this strip is the Marina Peninsula. Via Dolce and the southern portion of Via Marina are the boundaries between L.A. City and the unincorporated area.
In the mid-19th century, Moye C. Wicks and Louis Mesmer thought of turning this Playa del Rey estuary into a commercial port. He formed the Ballona Development Company in 1888 to develop the area, but three years later the company went bankrupt.
In 1916, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revisited the idea of a commercial harbor, but declared it economically impractical. In 1936 the U.S. Congress ordered a re-evaluation of that determination, and the Army Corps of Engineers returned with a more favorable determination; however, the Marina del Rey harbor concept lost out to San Pedro as a commercial harbor and development funding went to the Port of Los Angeles instead. In 1953, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors authorized a $2 million loan to fund construction of the marina. Since the loan only covered about half the cost, the U.S. Congress passed and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Public Law 780 making construction possible. Ground breaking began shortly after. With construction almost complete, the marina was put in danger in 1962–1963 due to a winter storm. The storm caused millions of dollars in damage to both the marina and the few small boats anchored there. A plan was put into effect to build a breakwater at the mouth of the marina, and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors appropriated $2.1 million to build it. On April 10, 1965 Marina del Rey was formally dedicated. The total cost of the marina was $36.25 million for land, construction, and initial operation.
