Long Beach

Long Beach is a port city in southern California, on San Pedro Bay south of downtown Los Angeles. The Queen Mary, a British ocean liner of the 1930s, has been moored in its harbor as a hotel and museum since 1967.

The land was part of the Rancho Los Cerritos and the Rancho Los Alamitos, and the town was laid out as a seaside resort in the 1880s. Long Beach was incorporated in 1897, and its beach, pier and amusement park drew visitors from Los Angeles by electric railway. So many retirees from the Midwest settled there that it was nicknamed Iowa by the Sea. Oil found on Signal Hill in the 1920s brought sudden wealth, and the harbor was dredged and built up into a major port.

The Port of Long Beach, beside the Port of Los Angeles, handles container ships from Asia and is one of the main gateways of trade into the United States. Rocket Lab, which builds small rockets and spacecraft, has its head office in Long Beach. Molina Healthcare, a health insurance company, is also based in the city.

The Aquarium of the Pacific, on the waterfront, keeps sea otters, sharks and jellyfish from the waters of the Pacific. Each April the Grand Prix of Long Beach, an IndyCar street race held since the 1970s, runs through the streets of the downtown. Naples, a neighborhood built on islands in Alamitos Bay, has canals crossed by gondolas. The Walter Pyramid, a blue pyramid on the campus of California State University, Long Beach, is the arena of its basketball and volleyball teams. Snoop Dogg, the rapper, was born and grew up in Long Beach.