Planning historians seldom examine freight infrastructure proposals as potential interventions into the political economic trajectories of materially productive regions. Combining interpretive approaches from planning history and economic geography, this article discusses one such proposal, the Joint Report with Comprehensive Plan and Recommendations, proposed in 1920, by the New York/New Jersey Port and Harbor Development Commission, as a response to the traffic problems generated by New York City’s innovative, small-batch manufacturing economy. Pointing out some of the limitations of the established explanations for the dramatic decline of this industrial center, the article argues that the nondevelopment of any local freight infrastructure similar to that proposed by the Joint Report closed off the continued development of the city’s materially productive economy as a historical possibility.
One possible exception here is Keller Easterling’s 2001 Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
2.
A quintessential example of this mindset is provided by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, which advocated the development of downtown Chicago as a luxury and office district, and the placement of industrial activities along the interurban railroads to the region’s southwest. See Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993 [1909]), 67.
3.
Thomas Adams, Volume II: The Building of the City (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929), 354-61.
4.
Staff of the Regional Plan, Volume I: The Graphic Plan: Atlas and Description (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929), 184, 198.
5.
For two very different accounts of the Regional Plan, each compelling in its own right, see Robert Fishman’s article, "The Regional Plan and the Transformation of the Industrial Metropolis," in The Landscape of Modernity: New York 1900-1940, ed. David Ward and Olivier Zunz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997); and Robert Fitch’s The Assassination of New York (New York: Verso Books, 1993).
6.
See Robert Haig, Regional Survey Volume I: Major Economic Factors in Metropolitan Growth and Arrangement (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1929).
7.
Erwin Bard, The Port of New York Authority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 8.
8.
Erwin Bard discusses this term in his The Port of New York Authority, 22.
9.
New York, New Jersey Port and Harbor Development Commission [PHDC], Joint Report with Comprehensive Plan and Recommendations (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Co., 1920), 92-105.
10.
Joshua Freeman , Working Class New York ( New York: New Press, 200), 11.
11.
See in particular the section "The Bits and the Pieces," by James Hund, in Hall (1959), Made in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 278-92. Hund argues that during the nascent years of the electronics industry (between 1920 and 1950), electronics firms in Manhattan existed not so much to churn out specific commodities on a repetitive basis but rather to experiment with apparatus parts developed by similarly experimental neighbors. As Hund points out, firm mortality was high under these circumstances, but firm rebirth was higher (at least, within the electronics trade). While on a day-to-day basis a given firm’s productive existence was by no means an unplanned free-for-all, long-term innovation thrived so long as local divisions of labor had a capacity for fluidity and rearrangement.
12.
Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity ( New York: Basic Books, 1984).
13.
Robert Allen , "Collective invention," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization4 ( 1983): 1-24.
14.
Expanding, that is, in every decade from 1870 until 1950, except for the 1930s. See Feeman, Working Class New York, 8.
15.
Edgar Hoover and Raymond Vernon ( 1959), Anatomy of a Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 31. See also Freeman, Working Class New York, 14.
16.
Freeman, Working Class New York, 55.
17.
Fitch, The Assassination of New York, 26. See also Freeman, Working Class New York, 66.
18.
See the chapter "A Non-Fordist City in the Age of Ford" in Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York, 3-22.
19.
Fitch, The Assassination of New York, 106.
20.
This is the argument Lizabeth Cohen makes about New York City in her Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass-Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003), pointing to the "planned obsolescence" of such local industries as garment making.
21.
Raymond Vernon , "International Investment and International Trade in the Product Cycle," Quarterly Journal of Economics80, no. 2 ( 1966): 190-207.
22.
Hund, "The Bits and Pieces."
23.
In his 2007 edition of Global Shift (New York: Guilford), economic geographer Peter Dicken points to such current "technopoles" as California’s Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128 Corridor, London’s M4 Corridor, the Baden-Württemberg region in Germany, the Emilia-Romagne region in Italy, Paris-Sud, Seoul-Inchon, Taipei-Hsinchu, Singapore, and Tokyo.
24.
See, e.g., Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
25.
See Robert Alcaly and David Mermelstein, eds., The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities (New York: Vintage , 1977).
26.
Joel Schwartz offers this explanation in his The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals and the Redevelopment of the Inner City ( Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1993).
27.
New York Times, February 5, 1918: 4.
28.
Benedict Crowell and Robert Forrest Wilson, How America Went to War: The Road to France Part I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 113.
29.
Crowell and Wilson, How America Went to War, 315.
30.
Crowell and Wilson, How America Went to War, 317.
31.
Josef Konvitz , "The Crisis of Atlantic Port Cities, 1880 to 1920," Comparative Studies in Society and History36, no. 2 (1994): 293-318, especially 314.
32.
See PHDC, Joint Report, 2; and also Jameson Doig, "Joining New York City to the Greater Metropolis," in The Landscape of Modernity: New York 1900-1940, ed. David Ward and Olivier Zunz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), 76-105.
33.
PHDC, Joint Report, 1.
34.
PHDC, Joint Report, 251.
35.
The report authors were emphatic on this point: "No joint railroad for standard rolling stock will solve Manhattan’s freight distribution problem." PHDC, Joint Report, 222.
36.
PHDC, Joint Report, 253.
37.
PHDC, Joint Report, 290.
38.
PHDC, Joint Report, 287.
39.
PHDC, Joint Report, 347.
40.
PHDC, Joint Report, 394.
41.
Referred to in PHDC, Joint Report, 217. See William Wilgus, Proposed New Railway System for the Transportation and Distribution of Freight by Improved Methods in the City and Port of New York (Submitted to the Public Service Commission of the First District by the Amsterdam Corporation, 1908).
42.
PHDC, Joint Report, 280.
43.
PHDC, Joint Report, 12.
44.
PHDC, Joint Report, 268.
45.
PHDC, Joint Report, 294.
46.
PHDC, Joint Report, 256.
47.
PHDC, Joint Report, 347-49.
48.
PHDC, Joint Report, 349.
49.
The so-named West Side Elevated Highway was to prove a temporary installment in the Manhattan landscape. In 1973, the section of highway passing over Gansevoort Street, in the Lower West Side, unexpectedly collapsed. The four-mile-long structure was closed to traffic and ultimately razed in 1988.
50.
PHDC, Joint Report, 345-50, and 408-19.
51.
PHDC, Joint Report, 367-68.
52.
PHDC, Joint Report, 281-86.
53.
Bard, The Port of New York Authority, 48; see also New York Times, July 29, 1921, p. 20. This film featured a cartoon of "Mr. Potato," whose face became visibly wearier as he embarked on his complex odyssey from a train yard in New Jersey to the Washington food market in Manhattan.
54.
New York Times, August 30, 1924, p. 4.
55.
New York Times, July 29, 1921, p. 20.
56.
Josef Konvitz , "William J. Wilgus and Engineering Projects to Improve the Port of New York, 1900-1930," Technology and Culture30, no. 2 ( 1989): 398-425.
57.
New York Times, September 18, 1929, p. 31.
58.
New York Times, January 22, 1928, p. 1.
59.
Bard, The Port of New York Authority, 50.
60.
Bard, The Port of New York Authority, 44.
61.
Bard, The Port of New York Authority, 56.
62.
Bard, The Port of New York Authority, 43-44.
63.
For a full discussion of the history of the Port Authority after 1930, see Jameson Doig’s magnificently researched Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
