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By Root 911 0

1970. With fewer vessels calling at New York City, fewer trucks were needed to deliver and collect cargo at the piers. Transit ware houses were abandoned or put to far less labor-intensive uses, such as parking. An entirely different pattern of goods distribution took hold. Sealed containers filled with export freight were delivered to Newark and Elizabeth, where they were stacked in the open until the vessel arrived; only small loads to be consolidated in single containers now required sorting in a warehouse. Imported containers were hauled straight from the pier to new single-story warehouses built on large plots in central New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. There, businesses could enjoy lower labor costs, while benefiting from the growing network of superhighways giving easy access to the port. Trucking and warehousing employment in these areas tracked national trends much more closely than in New York.

Employment in wholesaling, traditionally one of New York’s leading industries, was hurt as well, even as it was growing strongly across the country. If employment change in Manhattan and Brooklyn had mirrored national trends in these sectors from 1964 to 1976, the two boroughs would have added 200,000 jobs, most of them suitable for manual or clerical workers. Instead, New York lost more than 70,000 jobs in these port-related industries, while similar employment nationally rose 32 percent.

The changes in transport costs induced by containerization hit manufacturing, too, eliminating not only factory-floor jobs but also related trucking and distribution work as plants moved out of New York. Factory employment in New York City had begun to fall in the mid-1950s, a decade before the container came into widespread use, yet the city retained a surprisingly robust factory sector into the 1960s. In 1964, New York’s five boroughs were home to just over 30,000 manufacturing establishments employing nearly 900,000 workers. Almost two-thirds of the city’s manufacturers were located in Manhattan, where the apparel and printing industries dominated. The factory sector held steady through 1967, then abruptly collapsed. Between 1967 and 1976, New York lost a fourth of its factories and one-third of its manufacturing jobs. The scope of this deindustrialization was shockingly widespread, with forty-five of forty-seven important manufacturing industries experiencing double-digit declines in employment.41

How much of the loss of industry can be blamed on the container? There can be no definitive answer, as containerization was only one of many forces affecting manufacturers during the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. This period saw the completion of expressways that opened up suburban acreage to industrial development. New York’s high electricity costs pushed out some factories. The general shift of population to the South and West accelerated, leaving New York factories poorly situated to serve expanding markets. The economic downturn of the early 1970s contributed to a fall in manufacturing employment nationwide, and New York’s outmoded factories, often housed in antiquated buildings with little land on which to expand or rebuild, bore the brunt of this shrinkage.

There can be no doubt, however, that containerization eliminated one of the key reasons for operating a factory in New York City: ease of shipment. A New York City location had long offered trans port-cost advantages for factories serving foreign or distant domes tic markets, as local plants could get their goods loaded on ships with much less handling than could factories inland. The container turned the economics of location on its head. Now, a company could replace its crowded multistory plant in Brooklyn or Manhattan with a modern, single-story factory in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, could enjoy lower taxes and electricity costs at its new home, and could send a container of goods to Port Elizabeth for a fraction of the cost of a plant in Manhattan or Brooklyn. This is exactly what occurred: while industry fled the city, 83 percent of the manufacturing jobs