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By Root 901 0

percent in 1970. Two years later, 549,731 containers crossed the New Jersey docks. In New York City, though, only destruction was visible. Tonnage at the Port Authority’s Brooklyn docks fell 18 percent between 1965 and 1970. “The container is digging our graves and we cannot live off containers,” ILA president Thomas Gleason complained, and he was not far wrong. In 1963–64, Manhattan employers used 1.4 million days of longshore labor. Hirings slid below a million in 1967–68, breached 350,000 in 1970–71, and dropped to 127,041 in 1975- 76—a 91 percent decline in longshore employment in twelve years. Total employment at marine cargo-handling businesses in Manhattan, including office work, fell from 19,007 in 1964 to just 7,934 in 1976. The situation in Brooklyn was better thanks to the Port Authority’s investments, but not for long. Two years after Manhattan’s longshore employment began its protracted decline, Brooklyn’s followed, dropping from 2.3 million hirings in 1965–66 to 1.6 million in 1970–71 and to just 930,000 in 1975–76. By the time the Waterfront Commission closed its hiring hall at the Bush Docks in 1971, employment there and at the adjoining Brooklyn Army Terminal had fallen 78 percent in a decade. Brooklyn’s once mighty cargo-handling industry was just a shadow of its former self.38

On the New Jersey side, meanwhile, growth exceeded all forecasts. Stevedores and ship lines were complaining of a labor short-age. Forty ship lines were operating from Port Newark and Port Elizabeth in 1973. The new port’s relentless expansion led to a 30 percent increase in hirings between 1963 and 1970, despite the efficiencies of containerization.

By the middle of the 1970s, the New York docks were mostly a memory. Lighters carried a grand total of 129,000 tons of freight to waiting ships in 1974—less than one-tenth of the load moved in 1970, one-fiftieth as much as in 1960. Some shipping remained in Brooklyn, but Piers 6, 7, and 8, fully rebuilt in the late 1950s and known as “Little Japan” for their tenants, emptied out as five Japanese carriers moved to New Jersey. Bull Line, whose Puerto Rico business was a mainstay of the Brooklyn docks, shrank drastically before closing altogether in 1977. The four-pier complex on the Hudson River north of Fourteenth Street, reconstructed as a state-of-the-art terminal for United States Lines in 1963, stood vacant and unrentable, a monument to the city’s costly unwillingness to accept that its time as a port was over. When new tenants finally appeared, years later, the Chelsea Piers reopened for an entirely different use: recreation.39

The decline of the docks reverberated through New York City’s economy, most strongly in the poorest neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In 1960, there were only 23 census tracts, of the 836 in the borough, in which at least 10 percent of the labor force worked in the trucking and maritime industries. On a map, these tracts form a belt parallel to the waterfront, from Atlantic Avenue in the north to Sunset Park in the south. They had much in common: large numbers of immigrants, mainly Italian; low incomes; and very low education levels. In Tract 67 in South Brooklyn, 57 percent of adults had fewer than eight years of schooling. In Tract 49 in what is now Cobble Hill, 64 percent of adults had not gone beyond the eighth grade. Tract 63 in South Brooklyn was home to 1,071 employed workers—including only four with college degrees. By 1970, transportation-industry employment had fallen sharply throughout this entire district, and the population had plummeted. The depths of the decline could be seen in a housing study conducted a few years later: in Sunset Park and Windsor Terrace, an area adjoining the docks with more than 100,000 residents, not a single privately owned housing unit was completed in 1975.40

The revolutionary changes in cargo handling had far more dire implications for off-dock workers in transportation and distribution. Between 1964 and 1976, the number of trucking and warehousing workers rose nationally, but the number in New York fell sharply after