The Box - Marc Levinson [52]
Within six months of its start, Pan-Atlantic’s container service was carrying 120 containers a week between Newark and Houston. The Pan-Atlantic terminal in Newark had become a busy transshipment hub where longshoremen consolidated smaller shipments into full containers. In early 1957, after barely nine months of operation, Pan-Atlantic leased six additional acres in Newark, twelve times its original space, to store containers and chassis. After a government-sponsored study found that container shipping cost 39 percent to 74 percent less per ton than conventional shipping, the Propeller Club, the association of top shipping company executives, devoted a full day of its 1958 convention to containers. No one could doubt that conventional shipping would soon be in trouble.29
As container traffic surged, so did Port Newark’s fortunes. New ark’s cargo tonnage doubled between 1956 and 1960 while tonnage on the New York side declined slightly, taking New Jersey’s share of total port traffic from 9 percent to 18 percent in just four years. Pan-Atlantic, renamed Sea-Land Service in 1960, accounted for more than one-third of Newark’s general cargo and 6 percent of all general cargo in the Port of New York. All of this was achieved in the once moribund domestic trade, which had now shifted almost entirely out of Manhattan.30
A stone’s throw to the south of Sea-Land’s Newark terminal, dredges and bulldozers were beginning to shape Port Elizabeth. After two years of planning and after overcoming protests from wary local officials, the Port Authority had embarked in 1958 on a massive construction project: a 9,000-foot channel, 800 feet wide and 35 feet deep, directly opposite Port Newark; thousands of feet of wharf frontage; rail lines; and roadways up to 100 feet wide. Port Authority planners projected that Elizabeth would handle 2.5 million tons of container traffic each year, four times the level then being handled in Port Newark. The differences from New York’s dock reconstruction were plain. In a 1961 speech discussing New York City’s port redevelopment, marine and aviation commissioner O’Connor did not utter the word “container,” and the piers he was building were meant to serve vessels carrying mixed freight, passengers, and baggage. Port Elizabeth, by contrast, was designed from the start as a port for containers. Fortuitously, building on marshland required the Port Authority to start by dredging a channel, filling the wharf area with dredged spoil, and then allowing the fill to settle. Wharves and roadways did not get under construction until 1961, by which time Malcom McLean’s container concepts were even further developed. As eventually built, Port Elizabeth’s first berths each had about eighteen acres of paved area alongside, to cut down on the cost of moving containers from storage to ship. The design, the Port Authority’s magazine explained, “permits a continuous flow of trailers to shipside in ‘assembly line’ fashion.”31
The new Sea-Land terminal at Port Elizabeth, opened in 1962, operated on a scale that was inconceivable in New York City. McLean won government permission to sail from Newark to the West Coast through the Panama Canal, and Sea-Land’s traffic soared: the Port of New York handled more domestic general cargo in 1962 than in any year since 1941. Almost all of this cargo moved across the Sea-Land pier in New Jersey. Almost none of it moved through New York City. The leisurely port calls of the early 1950s were becoming a memory. A mixed load of containers and breakbulk freight—the kind of load New York City’s new piers were built to handle—was an economic drain, because the cost of extra port time to handle noncontainerized cargo ate up the savings from containerization. With no room to store thousands of containers and chassis and no way to handle the hundreds