The Box - Marc Levinson [46]
Marine construction and ship repair employed thousands more. Add in the lawyers, bankers, and insurance brokers who serviced the shipping business, and the livelihoods of half a million workers may have depended directly on the port. The area near Bowling Green, in lower Manhattan, was thick with shipping company offices, served by the insurers a few blocks away on John Street. Brooklyn, the most populous borough, had less shipping-related office work but more waterfront employment, with 13 percent of all jobs in the borough located directly on the docks.6
TABLE 3
Port-Related Employment in New York City, 1951
This powerful economic engine was already beginning to miss a few strokes in the years after World War II. Its location had helped the Port of New York gain market share during the war, as the re fineries and military terminals in Brooklyn and along the New Jersey waterfront dispatched thousands of ships across the North Atlantic. In 1944, when it moved nearly one-third of all U.S. waterborne exports, New York handled twice as much cargo as in 1928 and five times as much as in the worst Depression year, 1933. Even during the war, though, experts were warning of the parlous state of the docks. Those warnings seemed to be confirmed after the war, as cargo traffic slumped owing to the lack of imports from a prostrate Europe. Although European recovery briefly boosted exports, the Korean War put the U.S. economy back on a war footing and devastated foreign trade. The total value of imports and exports at all U.S. ports sank from $18.5 billion in 1951 to $15.6 billion three years later, with exports hit particularly hard as factories switched production from consumer goods to war matériel.7
New York was losing the battle for that export traffic. World War II had stimulated economic growth in the West and the South, and factories in Dallas and Los Angeles were much less likely to ship through the Port of New York than were plants in Rochester and Cleveland. The impending opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1956 would permit direct steamship traffic between Great Lakes ports and Europe, with one forecast predicting that it would divert 8 percent of New York’s exports and 3 percent of its imports by 1965.8
High land freight rates were a further handicap. New York officials were prone to complain that the railroads unfairly favored Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Norfolk, but the truth was that railroads and truckers could serve those points at lower cost; railcars could reach the piers without being floated across the harbor, and truckers faced much less congestion. New York’s rate disadvantage was even larger for truck freight than for rail freight, as sending a load by truck from Cleveland to the New York docks could cost four dollars more per ton than sending it to Baltimore. Truckers frequently sought to add the cost of New York port delays to customers’ bills, charging sixty to eighty cents per ton more to deliver to the piers than to other Manhattan locations and generating a flood of complaints to the Federal Maritime Board.9
Many of the port’s other problems, however, were of its own making. After three decades of labor peace from 1915 to 1945, labor turmoil became routine after the war. Some or all of the docks were closed by strikes in 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, and 1954. Between 1945 and 1955 the International Longshoremen’s Association, the legally recognized union throughout the port, battled with the Communist-backed National Maritime