CRTS Update #06-33

[John Krattinger <"crts_@_worldnet.att.net">]

CRTS Update #06-33
Monday, June 8th, 1998 at 13:30 EDT

By Fred Kaplan
Boston Globe

NEW YORK - When US Representative Jerry Nadler stares out across the old
65th Street
railyard on the western shores of Brooklyn, he sees more than the
abandoned warehouses, the weeds and cobwebs strewn along the
long-dormant railroad tracks, the picture-perfect tableau of urban
desolation. 

He also imagines superships steaming into harbor, cranes and dock
workers loading and
unloading millions of tons of cargo. And he pictures long trains coming
in and out of the yard, carrying the cargo through a rail-freight tunnel
that runs under the bay and connects New York to the rest of America,
restoring the city, for the first time in decades, as a bustling center
for global trade.

For 20 years, people laughed at Nadler's grandiose dream. Now it looks
as though it might come true.

It's an improbable epic, the story of this tunnel. It was dreamed up 80
years ago and has been quashed in a series of power struggles ever
since. Even Robert Moses, the near-mythic figure who built every major
roadway in this city and wiped out whole communities in the process, had
a hand in suffocating it.

Several urban historians believe killing the tunnel helped kill the
Brooklyn port - the linchpin of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar
jobs which were wiped out during the recession of the 1970s and never
came back. 

The chutzpah of Nadler's dream is that it amounts to an assault on
history and an attempt to reverse it.

''This city has 1 million people who don't have college diplomas,'' he
said, ''which means we have to have blue-collar jobs. Right now, we have
an increasingly narrow economy based almost entirely on finance and real
estate. Unemployment is twice as high as the national rate. Taxes are so
high because half of what should be our economy doesn't exist.

''New York grew up,'' he went on, ''because its farsighted 19th-century
statesmen created infrastructure projects that exploited New York's
natural geographical advantages - the Erie Canal and the Erie Railroad.
In 1820, New York had 2 percent of the country's interstate commerce. In
1825, the Erie Canal opens. In 1830, we had 38 percent.

''We've been collapsing slowly over the last 50 years,'' he said,
''because we've had no
infrastructure project related to our port. Everything grew up in
concentric circles around the port. All the financial services grew up
to service that. We've removed our core.''

The tunnel would reconnect the city to its core. It would even, he
contends, reduce air pollution because, according to one study, a
revived rail-freight system would cut the number of trucks spewing
exhaust across the city's expressways by 800,000 a year - nearly half.

Nadler, a liberal Democrat who represents the West Side of Manhattan and
a sliver of
Brooklyn, has been pushing, sometimes singlehandedly, for an underwater
rail-tunnel since 1979. 

He has a 2 1/2-hour talk on the project that he delivers without notes
to anyone who will listen. One of his aides, when asked how many times
he's given it, replied, ''Oh, about 10,000.''

Still, after years of lobbying and collaborating with commissions and
task forces, Nadler has finally put the tunnel on the agenda. 

''It's definitely a serious project,'' Deputy Mayor Randy Levine said.
''It has the backing of the mayor, the governor, the entire New York
congressional delegation, much of Connecticut's. We have a study, a
plan.'' 

Even Nadler, never an optimist despite his unflagging passion, raised
his eyebrows a little and said, ''I'm becoming fairly confident it will
happen.''

The idea goes back to 1921, when the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey was
created for the purpose of building such a tunnel. 

The Port Authority still exists as the public agency that operates the
region's ports, airports, and bus terminals. But it never built the
tunnel. 

The battles started in 1922, when Mayor John Hylan, not trusting the
newly created agency, started allocating the city's own funds for a
rail-freight tunnel connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Governor Al Smith, who had created the Port Authority, saw the move as a
patronage power
grab and told Hylan, also a Democrat, that he would back someone else in
the next mayoral primary if the project was continued. Hylan went ahead.
Smith put up Jimmy Walker as a challenger. Walker, who turned out to be
one of the most amiable and corrupt mayors in the city's history, won.
The first thing he did was cancel the tunnel. 

Hylan managed to sink two shafts into New York Bay for the tunnel's
support before his ouster. Decades later, when Robert Moses built the
Verrazano Narrows Bridge that connected Brooklyn and Staten Island for
cars but not freight trains, he ordered the landfill from the bridge to
be dumped into the shafts. He wanted to make sure the tunnel would never
be. 

(A tidbit of urban mythology, which nobody seems able to confirm or
deny, is that Moses could find only one shaft and that the other
remains, unsullied, beneath a basketball court in Bay Ridge.) 

Through the decades, the Port Authority has built up the ports of New
Jersey, but allowed Brooklyn's to decay.

Until the 1960s, rail-freight cars would come into Jersey and be loaded
onto barges that floated across the bay into Brooklyn, where they would
be loaded onto the train tracks, head out through Queens, curve over to
the Bronx, and on up to New England.

But then, all the Northeastern railroads started going bankrupt. The
federal government took them over and created Amtrak, and the Port
Authority created the Manhattan Transit Authority. But their plans saved
only the passenger rails. The freight lines remained dead. 

''It was a major catastrophe for the city,'' Nadler said. ''An area 11
miles long and 2 miles wide, all along the rail line, was once filled
with factories. Now it's empty. They couldn't get raw materials in, they
couldn't get finished goods out.'"

In 1962, Nadler recited, barges carried 600,000 rail cars across New
York Bay. In 1968, they carried 300,000. In 1969, after the final
railroad bankruptcy, the figure dropped to 5,000. 

This decline corresponded with factory shutdowns. From 1963-68, New York
City lost 51,000 manufacturing jobs. From 1969-74, it lost 289,000.

The de-industrialization of New York was caused by many complex
developments in regional, national and global economics. But the numbers
suggest the end of the railroads and the decay of Brooklyn's port played
at least an important role.

''All this area used to be a port terminal,'' Nadler said while driving
along an expressway in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, above the
railyard.

''In the rest of the country, 40 percent of freight goes by rail
today,'' he said. ''In this area, less than 3 percent.''

When ships unload in New Jersey or Halifax or Norfolk, New York-bound
goods make the
rest of the trip by truck. Shipping costs go up, road maintenance costs
go up, health costs go up. The nation's worst area for asthma is the
Bronx - right next door to the I-95 corridor of the George Washington
Bridge, which nearly all those trucks pass.

To Nadler, nothing is more obvious than Brooklyn's supreme suitability
as the nation's number-one hub port. To get to Jersey's ports in Port
Elizabeth or Newark, ships have to maneuver through the narrow straits
and sharp turns of the Kill Van Kull straits. The Port Authority spent
more than $1 billion in the past decade to extend the depth of the
straits from 35 feet to 45 feet. But now, Nadler said, the biggest
freight ships need 50-foot depths.

The Brooklyn port's New York Bay, on the other hand, has a natural depth
of 60 feet - 100 to 150 feet in the channel. The train tracks on shore
are still in good shape and stretch to the water. Extend the tracks into
the water, lay them through a tunnel to the railyard across the bay,
either in Jersey or Staten Island, and the port is ready for action. 

City-commissioned studies estimate a tunnel would cost $900 million and
take six years to build. In the meantime, for a mere $80 million, the
barge-floats could be revived as an interim measure. ''The floats
wouldn't have nearly the same benefits as a tunnel,'' Nadler said, but
''we have to do something now, if we want to be the hub port. 

''Because ships are getting bigger and fewer, the shipping industry is
going to a hub-and-feeder system, like the airports,'' he went on, his
speech getting more impassioned. ''In 10 to 15 years, there will be one
hub port on the East Coast. If we don't do anything, it will be Halifax
or Norfolk. If we do it right, it will be us.''

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