The Peninsula is home to military archaeological remains dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. Most of these structures lie in the area surrounding Rancho Palos Verdes (RPV) City Hall and are accessible to the public. This site was known to the Army as the Long Point Military Reservation.
During World War I Fort MacArthur in San Pedro was built to protect the then new Port of Los Angeles from threats of attack by enemy battleships. Fort MacArthur’s original major armaments included four concrete batteries, each with a 14” gun and two batteries each with four 12” mortars. These six batteries each has observation structure called a base end station which is a tiny, stand-alone concrete room built mostly below ground which can accommodate two soldiers. Each has an above ground viewing port. The first set of six were built on Fort MacArthur. In the following decade three more sets of six were built further and further away from Fort MacArthur to improve targeting accuracy. The last set of six was built southeast of the RPV City Hall site in the mid to late 1920s on the hillside overlooking Palos Verdes Drive South and the Terranea Resort. All six of these still exist.
One of the six base end stations southeast of RPV City Hall
Prior to World War II, the U.S. Army had developed a plan for upgrading coastal fortifications to keep pace with improvements in enemy naval weaponry and ship protection. When the war began, the implementation of this plan became urgent. One of these planned fortifications was a concrete battery, known as Battery 240 or Battery Barnes, designed to accommodate two 6” guns. It was built just west of the current City Hall building. This battery provided protection for most personnel, shells, powder, the target plotting room, a room for communicating with newly constructed look-out positions and diesel generators which provided a self-contained power source. The battery and one of its two concrete gun emplacements remain.
main entrance — Battery Barnes — concrete pad for a 6” gun
Finally, during WWII, it was already becoming clear that the day when the threat from battleships was disappearing, and was to be replaced by airborne attacks from manned bombers. So in the early 1940s work began on development of America’s first ground-to-air missile. In 1954 the Army began deployment of the first of this family of missiles, called Nike, around major metropolitan areas and other areas of military significance. The Los Angeles area was surrounded by 16 sites each with numbers of these missiles. The first generation of the Nike missile, called the Ajax, had a small conventional warhead which could destroy a single enemy bomber when the aircraft was no further than about 25-30 miles away. A few years later some of these sites were upgraded to the newer Nike Hercules missile, with a range of up to 90 miles, which could host a small nuclear warhead, and usually did. Because a nuclear weapon was more effective, fewer sites were needed and about half of the original sites were retired. One of the sites which hosted the Hercules was designated LA-55. LA-55L, the launch facility for this site, was located in what is now the RPV city yard. It is probably the most complete remaining Nike launch site in the Los Angeles area. A walk around the area reveals the original guard house, missile assembly building, diesel generator building, electrical substation and the tops (roofs) of the underground magazines used for storing the missiles, fuel and warheads. To launch a missile, it would have been raised by elevator from the magazine to the surface, wheeled over to a launcher, now long gone, and then fueled.
Underground missile magazine exterior with the top of the elevator in the raised position interior with the elevator raised.
As the threat from bombers gave way to the ballistic missile threat, the entire Nike program lost its value to national defense and was closed down in 1974 and the property on which LA-55L was located was turned over to the new city of Rancho Palos Verdes.
