The Box - Marc Levinson [49]
The Port Authority proceeded to exercise its new waterfront muscle. After signing McLean, it proposed to build a terminal for rubber importers at Port Newark—a terminal whose prospective tenants would relocate from cramped quarters in Brooklyn. In mid-1955, it finally got a toehold on the New York side of the harbor by purchasing two privately owned miles of Brooklyn waterfront, wharves that it had declined to acquire twice previously but now found politically opportune to buy. Proclaiming its interest in Brooklyn provided cover for another investment in New Jersey: a $9.3 million, four-berth terminal at Newark for Norton Lilly & Co. in November 1955, which led to that ship line’s move from Brooklyn to the New Jersey side of the harbor.18
Then came the most aggressive move of all. On December 2, 1955, New Jersey governor Robert Meyner announced that the Port Authority would develop a 450-acre tract of privately owned tidal marsh just south of Port Newark. The new Port Elizabeth, the largest port project ever undertaken in the United States, was planned eventually to accommodate twenty-five oceangoing vessels at once, enabling New Jersey to handle more than one-fourth of all general cargo in the Port of New York. Previously, the Port Authority had shown little interest in Elizabeth’s marshlands. McLean’s idea of putting truck trailers on ships changed that view entirely. Now, port planners foresaw a resurgence of coastal shipping, and the new Port Elizabeth would have ample wharf and upland available for “the proposed use of large shipping containers on specially adapted vessels.” There might not even be a transit shed, the most expensive part of pier construction. The first containership had yet to set sail, but the Port Authority was making clear that the future of container shipping would be in New Jersey, not in New York.19
The frenzy of activity on the New Jersey side of the harbor caused alarm in New York City. In the past, the New Jersey docks had been notable for their lack of activity; the modest traffic through Port Newark, mainly lumber, accounted for only a couple of percent of the port’s nonoil cargo through the 1940s. As ship operators relocated from New York, however, its share would surely grow. With the amount of general cargo flat, every ton handled in New Jersey meant one ton less handled in New York, draining jobs from the city.20
This simple calculus was a problem for New York politicians. Robert F. Wagner, familiar with the docks from years as Manhattan borough president, had been elected mayor in 1953 after assembling an unusually broad coalition of labor unions and ethnic groups. The one major bloc he failed to capture was the Italians, who voted over whelmingly for incumbent mayor Vincent Impellitteri. Gaining sup port from the group that supplied most of New York’s dockworkers may have been part of Wagner’s motivation in boosting Department of Marine and Aviation outlays to $13.2 million, more than double the previous level, in his first capital budget, announced in late 1954. Verbal weapons were soon unsheathed. In the summer of 1955, city marine and aviation commissioner Vincent O’Connor charged the Port Authority with trying to “sabotage” city efforts, in the face of “a growing City determination to meet the challenge of its waterfront without yielding its precious waterfront properties to Port Authority control.” O’Connor, a lawyer, was close to the ILA, and he shared its concern about the loss of jobs. That September, Mayor Wagner made pier reconstruction one of his top four capital-spending priori ties, along with education, transit, and pollution control.21
Concern about the docks reached to Albany as well. New York governor Averell Harriman was sensitive to city objections that the Port Authority was promoting New Jersey at New York’s expense, but he also knew that the city lacked the money to rebuild its piers. A week after the plans for Port Elizabeth were announced, Jonathan Bingham, a top Harriman aide (and former campaign