For no matter whether the city administration or the Port Authority (created by the States of New York and New Jersey) comes atop, the island of Manhattan will remain the crux and key of the whole problem. For its relief it may be necessary, as has been suggested, to build relief belt-line railroads no nearer than forty miles away from it. That is a matter for the future. For the present consider that disregarding political boundaries--traffic takes little or no thought of them--the commercial center of metropolitan New York (in the sense which I now mean, a well-grouped city of ten million people, even though in two separate States) is and must remain upon Manhattan Island. There is the commerce done. There the freight comes to a clearing-house. Manufacturing may increase and probably will upon the outer rims of the district. But distribution will remain close to its heart.
Consider for a moment, if you will, with me the antiquated freight facilities of the heart of what long since became the second city of the world, and which to-day, commercially, at least, is its first. Upon the long, slender island of Manhattan but one steam railroad has direct rail freight facilities. That road is the New York Central, which many years ago pre-empted most of the western edge of the island for itself and so gained a vast strategic advantage--also a choice assortment of political quarrels. However, the one thing probably more than offsets the other. There are nine other important freight railroads, however, entering the New York metropolitan district (not counting the West Shore, which is a subsidiary of the New York Central). These roads, together with the Central and the West Shore, occupy thirty-five vastly valuable piers in the congested sections of the island south of Forty-second Street and so hold the piers from coastwise and from outbound steamship lines which clamor constantly for them.
To these piers the freight-cars of these eleven railroads come on long clumsy car-floats, each accommodating about ten cars. The floats are loaded at the direct water terminals of the railroads across the Hudson and elsewhere and are poked by stout tugs into position alongside the freight-piers. In theory a single standard pier of Manhattan should empty and load, even in this rather clumsy fashion, about eighty cars a day. This is based upon having four floats at each of them at a single time. In practice they do well if they clear forty cars a day. The berthings between the piers are narrow, there is much congestion in them and in the rivers about Manhattan Island, and delays are not only frequent but constant.