This past Tuesday, Brooklyn's Chamber of Commerce and Sovereign Bank sponsored an Economic Outlook Breakfast featuring a number of speakers, including Chris Ward, Executive Director of the Port Authority, who in his speech talked about the idea of moving our local container port entirely to Sunset Park near 39th Street.
Among his reasons for this were the Brooklyn Bridge Park development, the need for the Brooklyn waterfront to be integrated with planning for Governor's Island, the changing face of Red Hook, the larger industrial buffer of Sunset Park (as opposed to the residential area near the local site here), and the Cruise Ship Terminal.
While all of this makes sense in many ways, what doesn't make sense is that this announcement comes less than a year after the Port Authority signed a 10 year lease with American Stevedoring, the company that operates the container port.
Back to the drawing board? Does this mean that the EDC should wait to ink its deal with Phoenix Beverages for Pier 11, if Pier 7 may be back up for grabs? The fate of our waterfront has so many ups and downs....
Stay tuned for this ongoing saga and check out more details from Chris Ward's speech and the other speakers of the breakfast at Brooklyn Paper and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
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Speaking of the Port Authority, they also made news this week with plans of making the Cruise Ship Terminal more environmentally friendly by trying to find a way for cruise ships to get electricity from the land grid while parked at the terminal, rather than idling with their less efficient and much dirtier diesel generators. Read more about that here.
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