The Box - Marc Levinson [53]
For the port as a whole, containerization still remained a sideshow in 1962. Containers accounted for only 8 percent of the Port of New York’s general cargo, entirely in domestic trades. None of the port’s international traffic, which remained in Manhattan and Brooklyn, was in containers. Yet the trend was ominous. As Sea-Land expanded in the Caribbean, the island traffic that had once flowed through Bull Line’s pier in Brooklyn moved to Sea-Land’s complex in Elizabeth. New Jersey’s share of the port’s general cargo reached 12 percent in 1964.
Despite yet more huge investments by the city, including a $25 million pier to handle high-speed ships on order by United States Lines, prospects for the city’s piers grew dimmer by the day. The Department of Marine and Aviation requested another $40 million for pier construction in 1964–65. The ILA, desperate to fend off competing claims to use of the urban shoreline, proposed that new waterfront developments in Manhattan should combine piers with apartments. But the combative O’Connor was gone, and the City Planning Commission was not afraid to take on his successor, Leo Brown, in the Wagner administration’s waning days. “We believe it is neither necessary, desirable, nor indeed feasible to ‘turn back the clock’ and attempt to rebuild two more miles of Manhattan water front for cargo piers,” the commission warned in 1964. In any case, fundamental problems had not been solved. Shipping executives continued to complain about petty corruption on the docks and about the “chaotic conditions that exist in the transfer of cargo between land and water carriers along the waterfront.” New concrete was not enough to make ship lines want to dock in New York.32
The Port of New York Authority was expanding without cease as container shipping became an international business. By 1965, half a dozen ship lines announced plans to launch container services to Europe in 1966, and dozens of new ships were on order. There was no longer any question of handling this business in Manhattan, or even in Brooklyn. Only Port Elizabeth had the space to accommodate the surging demand for container facilities.
The Port Authority rushed expansion at Port Elizabeth late in 1965, with five new piers and sixty-five acres of paved storage areas. At the time, no fewer than seven steamship lines expressed interest in moving across the harbor from the outmoded docks in New York City. Just ten months later, the agency moved ahead with yet another expansion, which would enable Port Elizabeth to handle twenty containerships at a time. The container tide was running so strong that the Port Authority no longer needed to pretend that Manhattan and Brooklyn would recover their places in the maritime universe. “[A]s we go through the next ten years in the Port of New York there’s no question in our minds but that a lot of the cargo will have to go from the center part of the harbor where the big city buildings are over to the Newark-Elizabeth location,” Port Authority maritime director Lyle King told a television audience. “As a matter of fact, they are talking that way now, with the plans for new container ships.” When New York officials demanded that the Port Authority build container terminals in Brooklyn and Staten Island in return for permission to erect the World Trade Center, they won only promises that the Port Authority would take a closer look. So far as New York City’s opinion-makers were concerned, it had become perfectly acceptable for the Port of New York to be located in New Jersey. “The Port Authority, a bistate body, must view New York harbor as an entity and locate its facilities on the basis of geography and economics, not politics,” intoned the New York Times.33
The numbers tell the tale of New York’s port. In 1960, with only Sea-Land allowed to ship containers under the ILA contract, containerized freight accounted for less than 8 percent of the port’s general cargo tonnage. More than three-quarters