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of all general cargo still came into Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 1966, with Port Elizabeth’s first phase up and running, nearly one-third of the port’s general cargo was crossing the docks in New Jersey, and 13 percent was being shipped in containers. “The Port of New York—America’s container capital” became the Port Authority’s advertising slogan around the world. Financial interests began to speak openly of other “worthwhile activities” that could be located on Manhattan’s waterfront, such as apartment complexes and marinas. Manhattan’s docks had fallen so silent that one ILA official accused city marine and aviation commissioner Leo Brown of doing “a fine job as a parking-lot operator.”34

New York City dockers and politicians fought back by seeking to block the World Trade Center and picketing city hall. “If [the Port Authority] can put money into Elizabeth and Newark, why can’t they spend some in New York, to help create some permanent jobs to replace those lost by the moving of the Brooklyn Navy Yard?” asked Robert Price, deputy mayor under John V. Lindsay, in 1966. The problem, he said, was simple unfairness. “New York City handles two thirds of the deep-sea cargo and has gotten only one third of the Port Authority’s investment.” All the Port Authority could offer in response was the promise that the relatively modern Brooklyn docks would continue to handle breakbulk cargo, although, “[w]ith breakbulk operations diminishing, it is unlikely that new conventional piers will be built in the near or distant future.”35

The Lindsay administration’s public bluster notwithstanding, officials now recognized that the Manhattan docks had no future. In 1966, parks commissioner Thomas Hoving requested permission to convert Pier 42 in Greenwich Village to recreational use; over its protestations, the Department of Marine and Aviation was forced to cede the pier’s upper story. By the following year, a dozen carriers had placed their first orders for new vessels meant to carry nothing but containers, both in their holds and on deck. No fewer than sixty-four of these gigantic ships were under construction, and the Port Authority touted a study showing that 75 percent of the Port of New York’s general cargo could move in containers. When the ILA’s Manhattan locals sought a meeting with Lindsay to demand that the city build new piers to save their jobs, even the new marine and aviation commissioner, Herbert Halberg, advised that “to build marine terminals in Manhattan, in the quantity requested, is not at present good economic planning based on the needs of the marine industry, nor good city planning.”36

The union made a last-ditch effort to preserve the old port by hiring Vincent O’Connor, Wagner’s marine and aviation commissioner, to lobby for pier construction. O’Connor delivered a plan for a combined ship/rail/truck terminal in lower Manhattan with an airplane landing strip on the roof. Another scheme called for a “vertical pier” over the East River, using technology developed for auto mated parking garages to lift containers from shipboard to storage places high in the sky. Such fantasies were of no use. “With few exceptions, all of the major ocean carriers operating containerships at the Port of New York are berthing at Elizabeth,” the Port Authority reported in 1969. When proposals for a new passenger ship terminal reached the front burner in 1970, Lindsay decided to get the city out of the port business at long last. “Dear Austin,” he wrote Port Authority chief Tobin in language unthinkable a few years earlier, “After considering the alternatives available to us, I am convinced that the entity best able to construct and operate the terminal is the Port Authority.” The passenger terminal would eventually be built in Manhattan—but the agency, soon to be renamed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had no further opposition from city government as it developed a vast new port well away from its geographic roots.37

As containers supplanted conventional ships, New Jersey’s share of the port’s general cargo reached 63