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By Root 890 0

Union and with the American Federation of Labor, which ejected the ILA on corruption charges in 1953 and then set up a new American Federation of Longshoremen in an effort to supplant it. With the demise of public loaders, the Teamsters union sought to claim the right to load and unload trucks on the piers, precipitating violent clashes between Teamsters and Longshoremen in 1954. Wildcat strikes on individual piers were common until the ILA, abetted by shipping interests that preferred one corrupt but reliable bargaining partner to constant conflict among competing unions, won a series of elections and regained control late in the decade. Throughout the 1950s, the high risk of labor disruption encouraged shippers to use other ports.10

Crime drove shippers away from New York as well. Cargo theft was rampant; most goods were packaged in small boxes or crates, so stealing wristwatches, liquor, or almost anything else was not particularly difficult. The bistate Waterfront Commission, created in 1953 after urgings from New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, made inroads against racketeering by banning public loaders and taking control of pier hiring. It deliberately sought to reduce the workforce and thereby raise longshoremen’s incomes in hopes that they would have less need to steal. Even after the Waterfront Com mission barred 670 ex-convicts from longshore jobs, though, one in five longshoremen had a criminal record. Cargo theft remained a massive problem—so much so that both the Port Authority and the City of New York refused to cooperate with the filming of a comedy starring James Cagney lest the title, Never Steal Anything Small, give moviegoers the wrong impression.11

And if land-transport costs, labor concerns, and crime were not enough to deter businesses from shipping through New York, there were the port’s decrepit facilities. The East River pier at Roosevelt Street dated to the 1870s, the Hudson pier at West Twenty-sixth Street to 1882. The city-owned pier at Christopher Street had been built in 1876. These piers, and dozens like them, were narrow fingers protruding into the harbor, designed for the days when ships would turn ninety degrees from the channel, point their bows to ward the shore, and tie up to the dock for days on end. Some piers were not even wide enough for a large truck to turn around. For the privilege of leasing one of these obsolete facilities, ship lines paid between $0.96 and $2.00 per square foot per year, three to six times the going rate in other East Coast ports. The city had launched a program to renovate and fireproof its piers in 1947, but officials judged the cost of building new piers to be prohibitive. Many piers were literally collapsing into the water. Abandoned pilings and floating debris from fallen piers were obstacles to navigation as well as an eyesore. “By 1980, it will be hard to find space in a whaling museum for piers that met the requirements of 1870 and were condemned as obsolete as long ago as 1920,” Port Authority executive director Austin E. Tobin commented in 1954.12

Despite its name, the Port of New York Authority was a latecomer to maritime affairs. The major activity of the bistate agency since its founding in 1921 had been building and operating bridges and tunnels; after its early efforts to rationalize the tangle of rail lines and terminals in the New York region were beaten back by the rail roads, the Port Authority retreated from involvement in freight transportation.13 But, as political scientists Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman noted in 1960, the independence and broad political support enjoyed by New York’s public authorities, including the Port Authority, encouraged them to “seek out new outlets for their energies.” In the 1940s, the governors of both New York and New Jersey asked the agency to get involved with shipping, for entirely different reasons. New York governor Dewey thought that the Port Authority might be able to push organized crime off the docks. New Jersey governor Walter Edge wanted it to develop piers on the New Jersey side of the harbor.