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Fine view of San Pedro California from the South, focusing on the recently constructed Outer Harbor and Inner Harbor and the existing and proposed railroad links.

The map shows Terminal Island, Wilmington and the town of San Pedro, with Pt. Firmin Lighthouse and Deadman's Island also named. Two breakwaters are shown, one of which was only proposed at the time. A number of early streets are named and several older piers appear in the north, outside of the modern breakwaters.

Railroads lines shown include:

• Los Angeles & Terminal Island Railway
• Southern Pacific Railway
• Achison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway (proposed)
• S .P. R & L. A. RY (proposed, shown below mountains)
• Salt Lake & Los Angeles Railway (proposed)

Advertisements on the back of the image for the Los Angeles Times with the circulation numbers for the first three months of 1897.

San Pedro's modern history begins with Phineas Banning, known as "the Father of the Port of Los Angeles." Banning arrived in San Pedro, California, in 1851, at the age of 21. At the time, San Pedro was a small fishing village of San Pedro, just south of the Pueblo of Los Angeles.

Banning's influence in Los Angeles grew quickly. He was elected to a one-year term on the Los Angeles Common Council, the governing body of that city, beginning May 10, 1858 and ending May 9, 1859. He soon began his own staging and shipping company. By the 1860s, Banning wagons were traveling to Salt Lake City, the Kern River gold fields, the new military installation at Yuma, Arizona, the Mormon settlement at San Bernardino and in an arc around the Southern California region.

In addition to his stage business, Banning began expanding the harbor and docks at San Pedro from their beginnings as illegal exchange sites for mission contraband during the Spanish and Mexican eras and made them efficient enterprises. In the late 1850s Banning and a group of Southern California investors purchased 640 acres of land adjacent to San Pedro for port expansion. The land purchase was incorporated as Wilmington, with the port becoming known as Banning's Landing. Banning invested the profits from his trade networks into the development of a more sophisticated port complex and for the creation of roads, telegraphs, and other connections to Los Angeles. In 1859, the first ocean-going vessel anchored in Los Angeles-Wilmington harbor and the 1860s saw the beginning of small-scale maritime trade between San Pedro and ships anchored in the deeper parts of the harbor. After government-funded dredging made a deep water harbor and breakwater a reality, the port continued to grow.

In the late 1869s, Banning began construction of Southern California's first railroad, the Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad which he sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1873. As a California state senator, Banning prioritized creation of greater transportation connections to Los Angeles and San Pedro. Banning eventually pushed through a plan for a small railroad linking Wilmington/San Pedro with the main city of Los Angeles, effectively halving the time necessary for the trip but the plan was short-lived. The Southern Pacific Railroad began building track to connect Southern California to the greater national railroad lines and demanded much of Los Angeles' prime real estate, an enormous sum of money and Banning's small connector line railroad, in exchange for adding Los Angeles as a terminus on the railroad. Realizing that Los Angeles would wither into nothingness if the company bypassed it, the city complied and Banning surrendered his hard-earned railroad.

In 1873, the first breakwater was built. In 1888, the US War Department took control of a tract of land next to the bay and added to it in 1897. The efforts to develop the port as the official port of Los Angeles came to fruition in 1897, when Congressman Stephen M. White pushed through legislation that made San Pedro the official port of Los Angeles.

OCLC records only a single example at the American Antiquarian Society, with a slightly different title, but similar advertising on the verso. Reps locates 3 examples (Bancroft, Los Angeles Natural History Museum and California State Library), each with the same variant title as the American Antiquarian Society, which is " Birds eye view of town and water front of San Pedro California. Showing the existing inner and the proposed outer harbor."

This is the only example of this view we have seen on the market in over 20 years.