Excerpt from The West Side Improvement and Its Relation to All of the Commerce of the Port of New York

The upland back of the Manhattan piers has been developed by the building of a marginal way, 180 feet in width and a public street known as West street, 70 feet in width, making the entire available street and bulkhead area back of the piers 250 feet in width. It has been the practice to permit the construction of bulk head sheds upon the outshore fifty feet of the marginalway, and it is in these bulkhead sheds and in the sheds covering the piers that the entire Manhattan freight business of the majority of the New Jersey railroads is carried on. In addition to the actual transshipment of freight through these sheds, the practice of allowing a certain amount of free storage time has made it neces sary to use a very large portion of the shedded area for warehouse purposes. Careful studies of the freight movement at Manhattan piers showed that practically all of the incoming business is handled in between two and three hours in the morning, and that the outgoing business occupies a similar period in the late afternoon. At least two thousand cars per day are handled in and out of these Manhattan waterside stations.

The necessity for dispatching the business within very limited periods of high congestion morning and evening, combined with the cramped conditions under which freight is handled over the piers and through the bulkhead sheds, has produced a condition which places a most serious burden upon the shippers of the City. West street and the marginal way are at times crowded with trucks to a point where it is impossible to reach the freight stations without intolerable and expensive de lays. Testimony which appears entirely reliable has been taken by a number of commissions which have ih vestigated the subject to the effect that several hours delay in waiting for a chance to receive or deliver freight is no uncommon occurrence, and that the actual cost to the New York shipper of getting freight to and from the waterside stations is frequently equal to or in excess of rail service as far west as Buffalo.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.