The Box - Marc Levinson [50]
The container was not yet reality in 1955, and given Malcom McLean’s status as a shipping-industry outsider, his plans had so far drawn little attention. With Mayor Wagner committed to keeping shipping in New York, O’Connor came forth with a six-year plan to build new piers and transit sheds, and the city began to pump large amounts of money into the docks. The 1956 capital budget included $14.8 million for waterfront construction as the initial installment on a port program that was estimated to cost $130 million. The plans were state-of-the-art for the mid-1950s, with piers parallel to the shoreline, separate terminal levels for passengers and freight, and paved patios that allowed trucks to back up to high loading docks on the land side of the transit sheds. There would be five new warehouses to handle rail freight lightered across the harbor and a big new terminal for Cunard’s transatlantic passenger liners. The crown jewel, clearly intended as a slap in the Port Authority’s face, was a $17 million pier with a cargo and passenger terminal for Holland-America line. After sixty-six years in New Jersey, that company would buck the trend that the Port Authority had unleashed and would move to Manhattan.23
After decades of inflation, the raw numbers are inadequate to con vey the scope of the city’s plans. Mayor Wagner’s proposed six-year port reconstruction scheme was to cost $130 million in 1956 dollars—the equivalent of $800 million in 2004 dollars. Across the country, the growing Port of Los Angeles had spent $25 million on construction over the ten-year period from 1945 to 1954; Wagner proposed to spend two-thirds of that amount on the Holland-America terminal alone.
None of these proposals, of course, could do much about the underlying problems of the city’s docks. Costs were simply uncompetitive with those at other ports. The fundamental geographic disadvantages remained. The new lighter terminals might make it easier to handle rail freight destined for New York, but rail freight in tended for an outbound ship would still have to be lightered across the harbor, off-loaded onto a pier, and then reloaded onto an ocean going vessel. Trucks headed for the docks would still have to fight traffic in the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and along the waterfront. And, of course, rebuilt wharves would do nothing about the port’s labor problems, problems so severe that the reopening of one of the first piers rebuilt by the city was delayed by a dispute over which ILA members would receive priority in hiring. O’Connor told ILA leaders directly in the summer of 1955 that the union’s practices were “a stumbling block for the city in its efforts to rent good piers in certain areas.”24
Wagner’s own City Planning Commission was skeptical of O’Connor’s port projects and recommended that the city restart negotiations to transfer its docks to the Port Authority; it “felt the Port Authority could assure greater development and utilization of the port with benefits to the City’s economy.” The mayor was unresponsive. Large-scale building was a hallmark of Wagner’s tenure, and he had no intention of ceding waterfront reconstruction to an agency over which he had no control. Wagner was close to organized labor, and the city’s labor leaders rightly feared that a Port Authority takeover would mean abandonment of some of the docks. Wagner’s lack of an ethnic base in New York politics—“There weren’t too many German-Americans who voted