The Trouble with Pinning Down Maritime
Connecticut Maritime Association has decided to move its annual meeting and exposition to Houston for the coming year. In the last few years attendance has shrunk and I suppose leadership thinks that Houston has more potential to draw interest from the maritime community. This leaves me to wonder what the “Maritime Community” actually is.
Connecticut Maritime Association had an interesting origin. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s many bulk ship owner/operators got sick of the long commute into New York City and decided to move their offices to Stamford Connecticut, where a number of these owners lived. Soon more owners and operators followed suit and Stamford and surroundings became a mini hotbed of commercial maritime.
Not all maritime moved to Stamford. Container shipping companies moved to the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, and in those days, this resulted in a weird vacuum in New York City. Soon underwriters and naval architects started to move their staff out of the city, and ABS moved to Paramus, NJ.
I am not sure the move to Paramus was ever well thought out and by the 90’s ABS had decamped to Houston. I have been told these moves were driven by ABS top leadership, where they simply moved the whole operation to the location where top leadership lived. Noting that with ever improving instant communications there was no reason to stay in New York City, other companies decamped to even more random locations such as Florida, Newport RI, Norfolk, VA and even inland locations such as Atlanta and Raleigh, North Carolina.
Everybody thought that New York city as a maritime hub was toast, and meanwhile it appeared that Houston was the new maritime hotbed, with Connecticut a solid but eventually declining mini hotbed.
CMA ran incredibly successful annual conferences for almost 40 years, but this year decided that New York as a maritime hub no longer was viable for its conference.
I don’t disagree, the proof is in the pudding. But maybe we are making the wrong pudding and that is something that has been concerning me for a couple of decades.
When I joined Martin & Ottaway in 1988 in New York City, industry people I met had one comment: “Welcome to a dying industry.” These were older executives who referred to the exodus I just described. They were heavily reliant on bulk commodity transportation and were basing their concern on the local decline, particularly evident in the Whitehall Club.
In actual fact I will argue that the greater Port of New York is much more significant today as a maritime hotbed.
Bulk cargo has become more efficient, particularly noticeable in the massive reduction in oil spills in the port and therefore less visible. However, in the 1980’s the cruise trade, the ITB inshore/coastal trade, the ferry trade and the excursion trade were at best tiny and in many ways non-existent and today are powerful industry segments in their own right.
Meanwhile, containerization volume continued to grow, and the total oil and chemical volume is still quite large. And after a very long absence, recreational boating in New York City is growing again too.
New York City has always been a cutting-edge port (Steam, excursion vessels, containerization, and many other examples) and continues to be a cutting-edge port. It led in the ferry revitalization and probably will be the lead port for waterborne micro cargo distribution.
It is thought that ship repair and construction is dead in the port of New York. That is not true it, it is just different. Bayonne Ship Repair and GMD can handle big stuff, but the most interesting shipyard developments are up the Hudson River at Feeney, Carver and even Scarano, each unique with their own exceptional strengths.
There actually is so much going on that some types of maritime are not growing simply because we are too busy dealing with all the other activities.
On a personal level I have become aware that high end eco-tourism in the Hudson watershed (which is a huge watershed; reaching from the top of the Adirondacks, Erie canal and Lake Champlain to the Hudson Canyon Marine Sanctuary) is completely underexploited.
So yes, maybe New York City is not the largest bulk commodities port in the United and only the largest container port on the US East Coast, but if one puts it all together it probably is the largest commercial port in the United States. A top container port, a significant bulk cargo port, probably the busiest ferry port in the United States, a very busy cruise ship port, probably the busiest excursion port in the United States, and a cutting edge port for micro cargo and ecotourism with an emerging recreational industry.
Hell, it even has the largest sewage tanker fleet in the United States and a massive water born garbage trade!
Maybe it was time for CMA to head to Houston, but maybe it is also time for forward thinking maritime types to converge on the Port of New York once a year, and to really figure out where the industry is going.
For every column I write MREN makes a small contribution to an organization of my choice. For the foreseeable future I am selecting SL7Expo. An industry wide effort to develop a Smithsonian level exhibit center for commercial maritime.
