" The union itself was partly responsible, having resisted containerization because it was not as laborintensive as breakbulk cargo. Still, let's say that the harbor commissioners had overcome the union's hesitations, and built a containerized port where Battery Park City now stands. There would still be the lack of a rail hookup, insufficient backup space, and trucks stalled in cobbled streets in downtown Manhattan, probably leading to a new loading racket. Manhattan can never again have a working port. I reiterate this as an antidote to that aching nostalgia (my own included) for the old New York waterfront. The New York waterfront treated its workforce as cruelly and crudely as any workplace can, while still making you wish it had continued to exist. In 1969-the same year that James Morris, soon to become Jan Morris, published a paean commissioned by the Port of New York Authority titled The Great Port (talk about your puff pieces)-the International Longshoremen's Union signed a contract to permit laborsaving mechanization and increased container shipping in exchange for a guaranteed annual income for its members, whether they worked or not. So the longshoremen finally lucked out with a golden parachute-or golden grappling hook-even if it meant trading their jobs in for retirement. The membership, 27,000 strong in 1969, has dwindled to a tenth of that: there are only 2,700 active longshoremen working in the regional port today. Many of them sit in isolation behind computers or in crane cabs, making sure that each container lands where it is supposed to, according to some prearranged master plan. Sometimes I catch myself wondering-in that oldtime liberal, pro union way one wonders-whether the unions were made the scapegoat for he port's problems. It seems not entirely coincidental that the Po Authority withdrew virtually all shipping from New York soon after tl wellpublicized waterfront crime investigations, as if to say, It's the unioi fault we can't do business here. But one of the last of the shipping пел reporters, Bill White, set me straight: "The union was rotten. No dou about it." White also wistfully told me that New York's working waterfront h; been one of the greatest spectacles in the world. With all that moveme and noise, and the smells of exotic spices, I don't doubt it: there is som thing intrinsically interesting about watching such work being performe as portwatchers in New Orleans or Barcelona can attest. How accessit that spectacle ever was to the ordinary New Yorker, as opposed to a shi ping news reporter, is a question. In Manhattan, certainly, there had loi been something of a fortresslike segregation between city and po "Rimmed off from the rest of the city by a steelribbed highway," Dan Bell wrote in 1962. Even in 1915, before the highways were built, Poole described in 7 Harbor "an unbroken wall of sheet iron and concrete" with "No Visitc Allowed" signs and watchmen to exclude the public.