The Box - Marc Levinson [48]
In 1947, the New York World Trade Corporation, a new state authority backed by key business leaders, proposed to take over all of the city’s docks and later to acquire all private docks and waterfront warehouses as well. New York mayor William O’Dwyer rejected the plan and asked the Port Authority to look at the city’s piers. After a three-month study, the Port Authority offered to sell $114 million of revenue bonds and build thirteen new steamship berths, four rail road carfloat terminals, and a 1.5-million-square-foot produce terminal, while paying the city $5 million per year in rent. This would have been no small undertaking: the amount involved, the equivalent of almost $900 million in 2004 consumer prices, was more than the city had spent on its docks over decades. The proposal quickly encountered heavy fire. The ILA was opposed. So was the city’s Department of Marine and Aviation, which ran the docks; it had waged a bitter and unsuccessful battle to keep the Port Authority from taking over the city’s two main airports in 1947, and it did not want to give up another of its functions. Most of all, city politicians did not want the Port Authority on their turf. City officialdom was convinced that the piers were a potential gold mine, not a badly outdated piece of infrastructure. As Robert F. Wagner, then Manhattan borough president and a member of the city’s governing Board of Estimate, asked later, “The piers were making money; why didn’t they take over the sanitation department instead?” The Board of Estimate rejected the Port Authority’s offer in 1948 and turned down a revised proposal in 1949.15
While New York officials thought they could modernize the city’s piers without the Port Authority’s involvement, the financially troubled city of Newark, New Jersey, had no such illusions. Its money-losing municipal docks were in a state of physical collapse. Newark agreed to lease its docks (and its airport) to the Port Authority late in 1947. Between 1948 and 1952 the agency spent $11 million to dredge channels and rebuild wharves. It then announced construction of the biggest terminal yet on the New Jersey side, designed for the Waterman Steamship Company, which would be moving across the harbor from Brooklyn. The Waterman terminal would have a fifteen-hundred-foot wharf running parallel to the shore for faster docking and easier loading—a feature no New York City pier could match. Watching the construction in Newark and the defection of a major steamship operator, New York’s city controller suggested that perhaps the city should give up its docks after all. “For some time the Port Authority dock control plans have looked good to us,” editorialized the New York World-Telegram. “Continued rejection can mean only that the city wants to hang on to waterfront control for political purposes.” A Port Authority spokesman declared that the agency was not inclined to begin negotiations with New York City again.16
Late in 1953, as the Waterman terminal neared completion, the Port Authority first heard of McLean Trucking’s desire to build a terminal on New York Harbor. A trucking company was an odd candidate to lease prime waterfront land, and its plan to drive trucks aboard ships was even odder. The timing, however, could not have been better. Port Authority officials were eager to draw additional business to build upon Port Newark’s success, and the agency was uniquely positioned to serve McLean Trucking’s needs. On the Newark waterfront it could offer space to marshal trucks, nearby rail lines, and easy connections to the newly built New Jersey Turnpike. Thanks to its ability to issue revenue bonds, the Port Authority had the means to finance any new facilities that would be required. All of these were advantages that New York City could not match. Malcom McLean and A. Lyle King, the agency