Long Beach
— — a working harbour with the Queen still moored in it.
Not only on a wall.
“Long Beach wraps the eastern arc of San Pedro Bay in southern California. The port behind it is the second-busiest container port in the United States, but the waterfront in front of it is something else: a long curve of beach, a 1930s Art Deco skyline along Ocean Boulevard, and the Queen Mary moored permanently across the channel in her own basin. The Pacific here is the colour of cool steel in the morning and warms by afternoon. Pelicans work the bait line. The container cranes on Terminal Island stand against the sunset like a different kind of skyline.
Long Beach, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Long Beach is a coastal city in Los Angeles County, California, with a population of about 450,000, making it the seventh-largest city in the state. It sits on the southern edge of the Los Angeles basin around San Pedro Bay, roughly 32 kilometres south of downtown Los Angeles. The city was incorporated in 1897 and grew through the 20th century around the oil and shipping industries. Together with the adjacent Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach forms the busiest container-port complex in the Western Hemisphere, handling more than nine million containers in a typical year.
San Pedro Bay is sheltered by the Federal Breakwater, a stone barrier completed in 1949 that calms the surf along Long Beach's main waterfront and gives the inner harbour year-round working conditions. The bay is shallow, dredged to about 23 metres in the main shipping channels to accommodate the largest container ships. The RMS Queen Mary, retired from transatlantic service in 1967, has been moored in her own basin in Long Beach since 1971 and operates as a hotel and museum. The Aquarium of the Pacific, opened in 1998, anchors the Rainbow Harbor end of the waterfront.
The Long Beach waterfront is easily walked from the Aquarium of the Pacific at Rainbow Harbor east along Shoreline Drive to the curve of the public beach. The Queen Mary is reachable across the channel via Queensway Bridge. Long Beach Airport sits inland, with Los Angeles International about 30 kilometres northwest. The climate is mild Mediterranean: dry summers in the low to mid 20s Celsius and wet, cool winters rarely below 10. The annual Grand Prix of Long Beach takes over the downtown streets in April, closing the waterfront to ordinary traffic for the race weekend.