A Few Good Men

Fort MacArthur is a former United States Army installation in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California . The fort is named in honor of Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur. His son, Douglas MacArthur, would later command American forces in the Pacific during World War II. In 1888 President Grover... Cleveland designated an area overlooking San Pedro Bay as an unnamed military reservation intended to improve the defenses of the expanding Los Angeles harbor area. Additional land was purchased in 1897 and 1910, and Fort MacArthur was formally created on October 31, 1914. The fort was a training center during World War I, and the first large gun batteries for harbor defense were installed in 1917. The effectiveness of these fixed gun emplacements was debated for many years, and test firings were extremely unpopular with nearby residents, the concussion shattering windows in buildings and houses for miles around. By the end of World War II the large guns were already being removed, with the last decommissioned in 1948.
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St. Elizabeths Hospital is a psychiatric hospital operated by the District of Columbia Department of Mental Health. It was the first large-scale, federally run psychiatric hospital in the United States. Housing several thousand patients at its peak, St. Elizabeths had a fully functioning... medical-surgical unit and offered accredited internships and psychiatric residencies. It has since fallen into disrepair and the grounds are mostly abandoned, although the east campus is still operational and it opened a new facility in 2010. The Department of Homeland Security announced in March 2007 plans to relocate its headquarters, along with most of its Washington, D.C.-area facilities, to the abandoned federally owned western campus of St. Elizabeths, beginning in 2010. The hospital was founded by the United States Congress in 1852, largely as the result of the efforts of Dorothea Dix, a pioneering advocate for people living with mental illnesses. It opened in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane, and rose to prominence during the Civil War when it was converted temporarily into a hospital for wounded soldiers.
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San Pedro Bay is an inlet on the Pacific Ocean coast of southern California, United States. It is the site of the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, which together form the fifth-busiest port facility in the world and easily the busiest in the Western Hemisphere. The community of San... Pedro, Los Angeles forms the western side of the bay, and shares the name. Most of the bay is between ten and twenty mt deep. The seabed near Long Beach has experienced considerable subsidence as a result of oil extraction in the Wilmington Field from the 1950s onward. Ironically, this helped the Port of Long Beach surpass the Port of Los Angeles as the leading port in the United States for a time in the 1980s and 1990s, since the deeper seafloor meant that Long Beach could accommodate ships with deeper drafts than could Los Angeles. Dredging operations related to the construction of a gigantic new marine terminal at the Port of Los Angeles have since made both sides of the bay accessible to even the largest existing container ships.
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