When I first moved to brooklyn in the early 1970s I lived not far from the waterfront and often walked along the piers to watch the longshoremen drive forklift loads of cargo back and forth, in and out of the dockside warehouses. By then these were trucking warehouses; cargo ships no longer tied up. But the dockworkers' hustle, the forklifts and hand trucks being maneuvered among the maze of stacked crates, were enough to evoke the gritty, labor-intensive, old-time Brooklyn waterfront that I knew from reading Arthur Miller and Budd Schulberg. Those piers and warehouses are gone, replaced by a gentrified waterfront park. What remains of the shipping industry in New York lies across the harbor along the New Jersey waterfront, where, from Brooklyn on a clear day, one can see the port's imposing gauntlet of 30-story-high steel cranes. This is a different kind of port, Rose George points out in her book Ninety Percent of Everything. There's hardly a soul to be seen. The modern port is "a place where humans are hidden in crane or truck cabs, where everything is clamorous machines."
展开▼
