The Box - Marc Levinson [45]
The growth of the trucking industry starting in the 1920s made the inadequacy of New York’s piers even more apparent. By midcentury, about half the cargo headed to or from the docks traveled by truck rather than by train. After coming through the Lincoln or Holland Tunnel, truckers had to navigate dockside streets so congested that, in 1952, the city barred all but pier-bound vehicles from Twelfth Avenue, the waterfront street in midtown Manhattan. If they were headed to the Brooklyn docks, truckers coming from the west had to fight their way through Manhattan to cross one of the East River bridges. Trucks normally waited in line an hour or two just to enter a pier to pick up or deliver at a transit shed, a warehouse adjacent to the dock. The transit sheds were usually designed with truck (or, in some cases, rail) loading docks on one side of the structure and access to ships on the opposite side. Outbound cargo would be taken off the truck with a forklift or by hand, stored in the transit shed until the ship arrived, and then handled again to get it onto the dock, with each operation adding yet more expense.2
Delivering by truck meant engaging a “public loader,” a type of enterprise unique to New York. A public loader was a gang that claimed the sole right to load and unload trucks on a particular pier, backed by the muscle of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the dockworkers’ union. Shipping interests, mayors, governors, and the Teamsters union, which wanted its members to handle the work, had tried for decades to get rid of public loaders. The men who did the loading were members of a thoroughly corrupt ILA branch, Local 1757, and were ostensibly owners of the “cooperative” for which they worked. In reality, however, the public loaders were secretly controlled by leaders of the ILA, which had joined forces with a trucking organization to create a “Truck Loading Authority” that published “official” rates for loading—5½ cents per 100-pound bag of almonds or marble chips; 6½ cents per 100 pounds of auto parts, tires, or fish guts; 8 cents per 100 pounds of canned beer—with all hours after 5 p.m. paid at time-and-a-half. Other firms that sought to handle unloading encountered vandalism and outright violence. Shippers that tried to circumvent the public loaders’ illicit monopoly by using their own workers to unload were liable to find that the ship would sail with their cargo sitting on the pier. Even after the newly established Waterfront Commission banned public loaders in December 1953, thugs continued to control access to the docks.3
The port was a vastly important source of jobs in New York City. In 1951, as operations were returning to normal after the war, more than 100,000 New Yorkers were employed in water transportation, trucking, and warehousing, not counting railroad employees and workers in the municipal ferry system. Another 14,000 New Yorkers worked in “transportation services,” such as brokerage and freight forwarding, handling the complexities of international trade in an age when each leg of a complicated journey had to be arranged, and paid for, separately. More than one-third of all “transportation services” workers nationally were located in New York. About three-fourths of the nation’s wholesale trade in the early 1950s was trans acted through New York, even if the goods did not always pass through the city. Across the country, about 1 in 25 private-sector workers (excluding railroad employees) worked in merchant wholesaling in 1951, but the ratio in New York was 1 in 15.4
Then there were the factories situated on the waterfront for ease of shipping. Food-processing plants had located along the Hudson River and the Brooklyn waterfront during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and dozens