Illustration by Christina Sun

A new computer. Summer clothes. A better desk chair. Your cup of coffee. Tonight’s dinner. How all that stuff gets from factory to front door is largely a mystery to most people – unless you happen to be stuck behind a truck on your way home.

The Port of New York and New Jersey is the gateway for over $175 billion of cargo annually. It is an interconnected web of ship terminals, highways and rail lines, all connected like a circuit board. Goods travel from port to distribution center to store to front door, carried by a giant fleet of tankers, tugs, barges, boxcars and trucks — lots and lots of trucks.

Trucking is the predominant mode of freight transport in the US, carrying 58% of commercial freight (by tonnage). In the New York metro region, it’s more like 80%. Meanwhile, federal studies consistently describe truck routes, highways, bridges and tunnels as being chronically congested (PDF). This isn’t news. We see it on the BQE, the Gowanus and Staten Island Expressways and the George Washington Bridge. And these are routes — the very long trips, the heavily congested metropolitan corridors — that the truckers themselves don’t want. Our waterways, however, are underutilized, with existing capacity waiting to be filled.

Illustration by Christina Sun

New York is a city blessed with incredible waterways. They reach into every borough, across to New Jersey and out to the Long Island Sound. To the north runs the Hudson River, up to the locks of the Champlain and 524 miles of New York State canals, leading us to the Finger Lakes region. To the west are the indomitable salt marshes, the silting arteries of the Passaic and Hackensack, the very busy Kill van Kull and Arthur Kill, and the Raritan River, which once connected us to Delaware via a canal now long gone. The East River mingles with the Bronx River and flows out into the mighty Long Island Sound and beyond, or runs inland as Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal. Out the Narrows, the waters flow through Jamaica Bay, Sandy Hook… and out to sea.

Once upon a time, the waterways were used extensively. Manhattan Island was ringed with piers. The shores were so thick with vessels that one could walk for stretches by stepping from ship to ship. Ships, tugs and barges would bring goods into the city by water, where the raw materials were manufactured into products that were then shipped or transported by barge and train back out.

Illustration of Manhattan and Brooklyn, 1884

Trucking, the least fuel-efficient means of freight transportation besides air, has relegated rail and shipping to second-class status. Spurred by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 — essentially the beginning of what has become a long history of invisible subsidies to trucking (PDF) — the proliferation of road- and air-based shipping options have led to a “warehouse on wheels” model. Cheap overseas products are aggregated in large pick-up depots. Whatever we need, we simply call in, order and have it shipped. Small neighborhood stores can’t compete. And so, as Kunstler said, we have sold out our communities to be able to buy a cheap hair dryer.

But the prices of what we consume don’t always reflect their true costs. Truck-centric shipping relies on stable bridges, clear tunnels and smooth roads. It ensures that trucks will continue to rumble into the city, burning fossil fuels in snarled traffic and beating up the infrastructure even more. All of which demands significant maintenance, not to mention environmental, costs.

Regional Highway Corridors, Scaled by Freight Volume, 2004 | via the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC)

But you never get a pothole in the water, as many shipping advocates say.

Short Sea Shipping is the use of small vessels to bring goods from central container terminals to little ports around the city. By extending the distribution reach of waterborne vessels, fewer trucks and vehicles are on our streets and they are driving shorter distances. Roughly 40% of freight in Europe moves by short sea shipping. And in Hong Kong, mid-stream operation moves even more.

Let’s take a look at a few potential shipping routes. Imagine which one you would prefer to take – if you could.

At the foot of Astoria Boulevard, your big box store sells a variety of goods at wholesale prices. Memorial Day weekend is coming, meaning outdoor gatherings, barbecues and picnics — and plenty of party supplies and foodstuffs. You have to plan for a customer rush that is going to last five days. Maybe some of your baked goods come in locally, from one of Brooklyn’s commercial bakeries, but most of your packaged foods and fresh fruits get shipped in. From distribution centers in Philadelphia, the Meadowlands or farther, your stock arrives at the Port of NY/NJ at Newark or Elizabeth. From there, a daisy chain of highway trips begins: south along the Turnpike, east over the Goethals Bridge, a drive (or crawl) along the Staten Island Expressway, over the Verrazano Bridge and another crawl up the BQE through Brooklyn until you cross over into Queens, right on the banks of the East River at a calm embayment known as Hallet’s Cove.

Illustration by Christina Sun

Or, suppose you live in a new apartment building on West 42nd Street, where a few boxes from Fresh Direct have just been delivered. Your picture-perfect peppers, beef tenderloin and ears of corn were packed on the banks of Newtown Creek. They were then loaded into one of a legion of box trucks, which motored down the LIE into the maw of the Midtown tunnel. Once out at 2nd Avenue, they threaded their way across town, passing through, or avoiding, busy hubs like Grand Central or Penn Station, until finally it arrived in your delivery dock — just a baseball’s toss from the Hudson River.

Imagine you’re a restaurant manager in the Meatpacking District. There is a good chance you get your paper towels, soap and cleaning supplies from Burke, a major distributor in Manhattan for paper, bathroom and kitchen cleaning supplies. Burke’s trucks all head out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, along Kent or Flushing Avenues at the edge of Williamsburg or Vinegar Hill, then over the East River bridges. Once in Manhattan, they make way across Delancey, Canal, 34th or 57th Streets to any of the thousands of restaurants in Manhattan.

Or, we could use our waterways to better link the Port with the big box stores, the Newtown Creek-based food distributors with Manhattan’s households, the Navy Yard with our central business districts. The scores of parking tickets, the hundreds of hours of driver time spent in traffic, the thousands of vehicle miles traveled (VMT), just to get across the water before a single delivery has been made — all of these problems could be mitigated if New York City moved towards short sea shipping.

It’s slowly starting to happen. A few days a week, tugs pull barges of containers from the Port of NY/NJ up the East River to Bridgeport, carrying goods that would otherwise be trucked across Manhattan and up the Cross Bronx or the Bruckner on their way to and through Connecticut. Further south, New York New Jersey Rail (formerly the New York Cross Harbor Railroad) uses New York Harbor to transport boxes and boxcars between New York and New Jersey, from Bush Terminal to Greenville Yards, in the last remaining car float operation in the Port.

Last year, the Port Authority bought Greenville Yards to allow more goods, in this case New York City’s municipal solid waste, to move off the land-based network and onto the water network. And ferries are mounting a comeback, with publicly subsidized commuter ferries returning to the East River for the first time in more than 50 years starting this June. (Though a ferry linking Rockaway to Lower Manhattan was tried recently, but failed.) Freight ferries — a very local form of short sea shipping — may not be that far down the road.

Illustration by Christina Sun

Expansion of water-based intermodal shipping is a challenge and test projects haven’t always succeeded. The Albany Express Barge service, a 2003 pilot program to carry containers from NY/NJ to Albany operated by the private tug-and-barge firm Columbia Coastal, was terminated when cargo volumes didn’t meet expectations and their EPA funding ran out. Public perception still sees truck freight, erroneously, as a cheaper and faster option, either ignoring or unaware of the incredible inefficiencies of road-based transport, the costs of infrastructure wear-and-tear, the resulting air pollution and the hidden subsidies that pay for road maintenance and repair. The labor structure of who gets to work on the waterfront is very complicated. And of course New York City has lost most of its working piers and usable docks. But what we do have here in the heart of the harbor are the right conditions (traffic, congestion and a constant flow of goods), a revived appreciation for the potential of our network of waterways and a creative community of designers who can imagine new ways to re-activate its freight potential.

Potential economic benefit exists for both shipper and consumer. Hundreds of hours of driving time would be saved, as truck drivers could come to work via mass transit, meeting the incoming barge at East 35th Street or Downtown to start their day. Wear and tear on roads and river crossings would be reduced, as would traffic. Job opportunities would increase as tug companies need more captains, deckhands, cargo handlers, longshoremen, stevedores and cargo facility workers.

The environmental implications are also significant — and crucial to bear in mind. Less traffic means less congestion, which means better air quality for everyone. 73% fewer air emissions are released with every ton of cargo moved by barge rather than by truck. An increase in sea shipping also means fewer gas-guzzling trucks on our roads, an important shift in the face of maxed-out global oil production and the increasingly risky and destructive practices we are employing to get at what’s left.

National Highway Freight Network, 2004 | Reebie Associates and FHWA Freight Analysis Framework Project, via NYMTC

No picture is simple, no matter how it’s painted. Our nearly 100-year-old national highway system and its financial underpinnings are, for better or worse, ingrained in our transportation policy, our tax structure and our infrastructure. But looking ahead, we aren’t going to see a plentiful purse for the public sector for a generation or more and we need to use what we have to its fullest potential. The US Department of Transportation is taking notice. Last year, the USDOT launched the America’s Marine Highways Program, an initiative to develop marine transportation corridors in response to the same congestion, pollution and economic challenges we have been discussing here.

Just as the East River ferry plans will improve mobility for many individuals, so can the marine highway for the movement of goods. Making our waterways a more integral and reliable component of our transportation system provides an opportunity for us to improve the urban environment on land.

New York Harbor, 1951 | image by Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. via the New York State Archives

Carter Craft is principal of Outside New York, a small consulting firm that provides a broad range of services including project management, program development, waterfront planning, communications, and fundraising. Current clients include the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, NYC Swim, and Ver Nautica/ The Ferry Lab. Previous clients included the Red Bull Air Race – New York / NJ (2010) and the Kingdom of the Netherlands’ “Holland on the Hudson” Celebration (2009). Carter is a licensed Captain, and serves as a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, Adjunct Professor at Fordham University, and co-Chair of the Harbor Education Subcommittee of the full Harbor Operations Committee of the Port of New York and New Jersey.

Christina Sun is an illustrator and a part-time deckhand. She writes and illustrates Bowsprite, a blog on New York Harbor.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Click image above to visit the Rising Currents website

The creative upwelling that you will soon be able to see at MoMA is one of those unique points of public focus that come along only every decade or so. With a name like “Rising Currents” it’s easy to ask if anything will actually float up to the top. Or will all the ideas take in water and lie in suspension until its just too late? Already the blogosphere and comment boards such as the one over at New York Magazine‘s website are filling up with decriers: “Don’t people know that global warming has been debunked?” That our “methane is worse than our CO2?”

Nevertheless, just think for a moment if somehow we managed to bring back vibrant aquatic life to the shores of our inner harbor. If a resurgence of oysters and shellfish ate up all the bacteria our sewage treatment plants cannot. If New York Harbor waters were actually made to be swimmable again, would that be a bad thing? Let’s not waste the opportunity to ponder these questions. Grab your date book and pencil in “March 24th – October 11th.” It isn’t often the stars in our cultural, design, and media worlds all focus on the same topic, and for this reason alone we should all pay close attention to what’s presented and dare to ask, “So what do we do next?”

The exhibition prompted five New York architecture firms to each come up with architectural solutions for the problem of rising ocean waters around Upper New York Bay. The choice of sites ignores the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge – where rising waters are already being blamed for disappearing marshes – and the Rockaways – where barrier islands are populated heavily by senior citizens as well as low income residents. But we can forget that for a moment and delve into the deep pool of talent applied to this imminent challenge. See the map below for how the Upper Bay was divided up amongst the designers:

0. Architecture Research Office (ARO) and dlandstudio,  1. Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects (LTL) 2. Matthew Baird Architects 3. nARCHITECTS 4. Scape Studio

For those who haven’t had the time to peruse the MoMA site or attend either of the open houses at PS1 over the last few months, here are a few things to look for when you go.

Matthew Baird Architects, Zone 2

In my mind the most compelling idea comes out of Matthew Baird Architects‘ look at the western part of New York Harbor and the Kill Van Kull.

This area isn’t even on most New Yorkers’ radar screen. Inside this industrial landscape – still home to tank farms, oil terminals, and even a Scottish “Links” style golf course (you look surprised?) – Baird’s firm proposes a new wave of industrial development. Combining the millions of cubic yards of silt and mud that are dredged up out of the harbor each year with the millions of tons of recycled glass collected throughout the region, a Seuss-esque harborside factory could roll out, in Jane Margolies’ words, “jumbo crystalline jacks” which could then be assembled on the bay floor and post a “free parking” sign for algae, shellfish and other aquatic life. At a time when everything in Washington and Albany alike seems to be retreating like a fast-moving glacier, it’s inspiring to see someone tackle two big problems – repurposing industrial waste and providing new habitat for marine life – with one potential solution.

Scape Studio, Zone 4

Across the Harbor, the Gowanus Bay and Buttermilk Channel team – led by Scape studio – starts with a much, much smaller building block: the oyster.

Oysters, that most-celebrated bivalve, are enjoying a resurgence throughout the region, from Soundview in the Bronx to Somerville Basin in Jamaica Bay. A whole network of oyster-lovers, cultivated by New York-New Jersey Baykeeper, is itself now spawning a new initiative that is so big even the US Army Corps of Engineers is getting on board. That Agency’s goal – to restore 500 acres of oyster reefs around the estuary – makes this ecological vision something that could actually happen if we just help nature get started and then move out of the way. Some might say that this team had an easier assignment, given the huge amount of study and consideration the Gowanus Canal has been given for more than a decade. Still, a close look at their proposal beneath the surface of the water reminds us that the health of the Canal is linked to the health of Gowanus Bay and to the adjacent Bay Ridge flats.

nARCHITECTS, Zone 3

Heading south to the Narrows, the team of nARCHITECTS had probably the most challenging study area.

Southwest Brooklyn’s waterfront, with its acres of landfill and piers and the sliver of Belt Parkway, doesn’t pair simply to the Clifton and Stapleton areas of Staten Island. The urban fabric and scale of uses are very different in each place, and the only unifying element here is the mouth of the Upper Bay at the Narrows. Given the assignment - “to re-envision the [New York Harbor] coastlines … with adaptive ‘soft’ infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology” – surge barriers may seem an obvious solution to suggest. However, to bring this effort into its larger context we must not forget the need to create new barriers along the Arthur Kill and Long Island Sound. Just like Times Square, there are many, many ways to get to the Upper Bay. The team succeeds by creating a new vertical reality: a semi-submerged housing typology where blue space downstairs becomes the “front” yard and the roof garden becomes the “back” yard. One can almost imagine the concrete and steel lobbyists now gathering at the Hilton to figure out how to make this modular prototype of residential construction the new Celebration, FL – on FEMA’s dime.

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, Zone 1

Moving clockwise along the clock face of the harbor, LTL had a simple and yet very challenging project area in the form of Liberty State Park, Jersey City.

In this study area, the question arises: wipe the slate clean or protect and strengthen the existing uses? LTL’s treatment represents, in my mind, the maturation of public design competitions today. Wiping the slate clean is easy. Ask anyone who has ever done an historic renovation and they will agree. But nowadays one cannot really do that – you end up fending off attacks rather than interpreting your ideas. The “monumental inundation” the team prepares for seems still bound by its historic geometry. As an old railroad yard in the 19th and 20th centuries, the site bears almost all straight line edges and has but a few curves. But here they find in the old railroad terminal (built in 1889, it is the oldest ferry terminal still in the Harbor) an iconic template which they inflate to the whole scale of the Park and study area. The ferry racks – which face the red brick Richardson-Romanesque building – are like the jaws of beetles waiting to grab the vessels arriving from New York and especially from Ellis Island. Today they are largely intact, but wholly and almost strangely unprogrammed. LTL inflates these slips into giant piers, cramming onto each of them some combination of uses which already adorn the giant park. The resulting construct is on a scale that might speak to and even welcome vessels visiting from outer space. Big thinking indeed!

Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio, Zone 0

Ending this Palisade Bay runaround and returning to Lower Manhattan we return to the realities of our existence today: huge amounts of financial capital embedded in schist, just a Frisbee toss from the rising tide.

ARO and dlandstudio hark back to the colony’s founding: the canals that became the first local arteries of commerce. The wetlands, which Mannahata reminded us used to be here, have been mercilessly filled in as we haved marched to progress and prosperity. Bravely, this team seems to insert even a few new buildings in towards the edge, albeit with a program that is much more stratified and cognizant that ground floor space in Manhattan may actually not always command such a premium.

Visit the area today and you’ll see, right outside the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan, three steps at grade for you to walk up, before you go down a couple dozen to get to the subway. Many years ago, the public agencies that drive capital construction in NYC realized that the impact of large storms and surges was not simply a threat, but a reality. In low lying areas like Tribeca or parts of Chelsea they are building accordingly, raising grates and station entrances to keep the water from pouring in.

Now with Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront about to open at one of the city’s most celebrated cultural institutions, the question is not at all “whose scheme is the best?” Rather, when do we bring the Cost Estimators in? There are dozens of good ideas here. The challenge is, who will build some of them to see how they work?

Image by Cameron Davidson/John Blackford via www.siliconbeat.com | This image is not associated with the MoMA exhibition, but it bears keeping in mind: we ignore the premises of Rising Currents at our peril.

Carter Craft is a waterfront planner and co-founder of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. He is a licensed Captain working in the private sector and teaches the Waterfront Planning seminar at Pratt Institute. This summer he will co-teach the Sustainable New York City course at Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Locally, the currents along this stretch of the East River make it a logical place to start tidal power efforts. During the peak of the tidal energy the water is moving nearly 6 miles per hour through here— about twice as fast as it moves through the much wider Hudson. The East River is unique in that it doesn’t really have much natural flow. It’s really a tidal strait connection the Harbor down by the Battery with Long Island Sound, and therefore it’s constantly pushed and pulled between these two bodies of water, themselves being pushed and pulled by the Atlantic Ocean.

What I find most interesting is that we are still very much in the research and development phase on all these projects. We hear about engineering and tech companies involved, but I wonder where are the naval architects? And as long as it’s taken for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project to really get moving it’s clear they haven’t overcome all the fundamental design challenges that the environment presents: massive physical force and flow of the water; the highly corrosive effect of the salt in the water, and of course the occasional obstruction or collision with other things IN the water.

Looking ahead, I think we need to be careful about a few things:

1) over-industrializing our waterways – are we starting off on a slippery slope?

2) Protecting the needs of the maritime users like tugboats, ferries and barges – the waterways are STILL basic transportation resources and given our ever increasing needs for mobility we should keep them that way.

3) Ensuring we’ve got enough waterfront industrial land so that by the time we’ve got a workable tidal turbine, we’ve got available waterfront land where those turbines can be built and splashed into the water, and pulled out as needed so they can be repaired.

Energy and mobility – it’s really what this great country is all about! So let’s not have one at the expense of the other.

Carter Craft is a waterfront planner and licensed Captain working in the private sector. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Planning and the Environment at Pratt Institute where he teaches the summer Waterfront Seminar. For more than a decade, he has been involved with a wide range of civic and community groups working to revitalize the waterfront including the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, the Manhattan Island Foundation, the Hoboken Cove Community Boathouse, and the New York Harbor School.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.