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E-book Mobilizing the Metropolis : How the Port Authority Built New York
A remarkable structure sits on the west side of Manhattan. Although 111 Eighth Avenue is only eighteen floors high, it consumes an entire massive New York City block and was built with big things in mind. The building (see fig. 1.1), which contains 50 percent more square feet than the Empire State Building, was designed with elevators so large they could accommodate trucks weighing twenty tons. It is perhaps appropriate that today it houses Google’s New York City headquarters, a firm often described using similar superlatives. However, from when construction was completed in 1933 until 1973, the building had very different uses. It served as an enormous trans-fer facility for railroads and truckers (President Franklin D. Roosevelt once described it as the first great post office for freight) as well as the city’s largest exhibition hall. The owner of the building, the Port of New York Authority, had its headquarters on the upper floors, where ambitious public officials mobilized the metropolis to build even more impressive structures, securing New York’s role as one of the greatest cities in the world.1The Authority (since 1972 known as the “Port Authority of New York and New Jersey” or simply the “Port Authority”) is a bistate partnership between New York and New Jersey that builds, operates, and maintains critical trans-portation and real estate assets. It was established in 1921 in an effort to find solutions to infrastructure development and freight mobility conflicts inher-ent in the economically integrated but geographically and politically frag-mented New York metropolitan region. Although the Authority’s name sug-gests that its responsibilities are limited to managing the region’s shipping ports, in fact its influence extends to developing, planning, and regulating a wide range of transportation infrastructure on water, roads, rails, and in the air. Almost all its assets are located within a twenty-five-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty, with a portfolio that includes five airports, four marine ter-minals, three bus stations, four bridges, and two tunnels, as well as numerous real estate sites including the World Trade Center. As the Port Authority marked its centennial in 2021, few would have dis-puted its significance to the region. Its facilities permit the (usually) effective circulation of millions of people and a more than a million tons of goods every day.2 It is a crucial actor, and often leader, of major infrastructure devel-opment projects across the region. The Authority has emerged as a criti-cal voice in regional planning and has unquestionably operated on an epic scale—orchestrating the construction of monumental infrastructure such as the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River (the world’s busi-est motor vehicle crossing), consolidating the management of three of the nation’s busiest airports, and constructing (and then reconstructing) the World Trade Center. As an organization, it has frequently proved masterful at achieving its goals—often in the face of daunting opposition.
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