The Box - Marc Levinson [51]
Port spending took on unprecedented proportions. In September 1957, Mitsui Steamship Company agreed to move to a new $10.6 million city-owned terminal in Brooklyn, and Holland-America signed a twenty-year lease for the new terminal in Manhattan. By 1957, O’Connor was envisioning $200 million of waterfront investment by 1962—the equivalent of $1.4 billion in 2004 dollars. Talk of selling the piers to the Port Authority subsided. For their part, Tobin and King were now convinced that the container was the future, and the Port Authority lost interest in taking over city piers that would never have the acreage or transport connections for containers. Although the Port Authority was proceeding with plans to turn twenty-seven outmoded piers in Brooklyn into twelve modern ones, the agency understood that it was in a race to recover its in vestment before container shipping made the reconstructed piers obsolete. “We already knew that we were building something [in Brooklyn] that would pay itself back, but it wasn’t the future,” re called Guy F. Tozzoli, then the Port Authority’s head of port planning. The agency’s greater concern was that the city was unleashing a subsidy war that could depress pier rents. Tobin attacked the “utter inadequacy” of the city’s lease with Holland-America, contending that it involved a city subsidy of $458,000 a year, creating a “new policy of undercutting established pier rental levels by subsidizing private shippers.” O’Connor fired back that the “port octopus” was exerting “all its propaganda efforts to thwart the City in the desire of New York to keep its waterfront under the control of its citizens rather than yield it to a bi-state group which thrives on its lack of direct responsibility to the public.”26
The City Planning Commission, meanwhile, was promoting the view that the port might not be the city’s economic future after all. It wanted new office and residential buildings along the East River in lower Manhattan, and suggested in 1959 that rebuilding derelict piers for shipping was not the best use of precious waterfront land. O’Connor responded by enlisting the support of Robert Moses, the city’s powerful parks commissioner and a member of the Planning Commission, and then by attacking the Planning Commission itself. Wrote O’Connor: “The assertion, elaborately made by the Commission, that the potential of the Port of New York must be judged by its recent past, rather than by an affirmative anticipation of its future, is an example of negative, rather than constructive planning. It would appear to be inconsistent with the dynamism of New York.”27
Left unsaid was that much of the city’s investment was already going to waste. In 1955, when O’Connor first proposed building five new terminals to handle cross-harbor lighter traffic, lighters moved 9.5 million short tons of cargo between New Jersey and the New York City docks. By 1960, after the city had spent $10 million on new lighter terminals, one-third of that traffic had vanished, and the trend was inexorably downward. The rebuilt Pier 57 on the Hudson River, custom-designed for Grace Line’s combined passenger and freight service, was modern enough, but the rapid expansion of air travel had