 As LIFE Magazine reminded its readers in
November 1944, "With its seven bays, four river mouths [and] four estuaries, [New York Harbor]
is by far the world's best and biggest natural harbor and most of the world's
major ports could easily be tucked into it."
Totalling an area of more than 1,200 square miles, New York Harbor
comprises more than 430 square miles of water including the vast 122-square-mile expanse of the Lower Bay, as well as, above the Narrows, the deep and
protected waters of the Upper Bay. (In the photo at left, the aircraft carrier USS Ranger lies at anchor off the Battery, New York City, 1940.)
From the north, the Hudson River linked the harbor with the continental
interior, channeling the produce and products of the upper midwest to New York
via the Great Lakes and the New York State Barge Canal while, to the east, Long
Island Sound provided an avenue from the harbor to coastal New England and the
Atlantic Ocean beyond.
During World War II, New York Harbor was divided into 600
individual ship archorages able to accommodate ocean-going vessels awaiting
berthing or already loaded and awaiting convoy assignment and sortie. On
the peak day in March 1943, there were a total of 543 merchant ships at anchor
in New York Harbor, a figure very close to maximum capacity.
The Port of New York was really eleven ports in one. It boasted a developed shoreline of over 650 miles comprising the waterfronts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, as
well as the New Jersey shoreline from Perth Amboy to Elizabeth, Bayonne, Newark,
Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken.
The Port of New York included some 1,800 docks, piers, and wharves of
every conceivable size, condition, and state of repair. Some 750 were
classified as "active" and 200 were able to berth 425 ocean-going vessels
simultaneously in addition to the 600 able to anchor in the harbor. These
docks and piers gave access to 1,100 warehouses containing some 41 million
square feet of inclosed storage space.
In addition, the Port of New York had thirty-nine active shipyards,
not including the huge New York Naval Shipyard on the Brooklyn side of the East
River. These facilities included nine big ship repair yards, thirty-six large
dry-docks, twenty-five small shipyards, thirty-three locomotive and gantry
cranes of fifty-ton lift capacity or greater, five floating derricks, and more
than one hundred tractor cranes. Over 575 tugboats worked the Port of New York.
Between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day, more than three million troops and
their equipment and over 63 million tons of additional supplies and materials
were shipped overseas through the Port of New York.
While the origins and growth of the maritime community of the Port of
New York have been the subject of a number of studies (Robert G. Albion, The
Rise of New York Port, Richard McKay, South Street: A Maritime History of New
York, and the WPA Writers' Project, Maritime History of New York to name a
few), the port in its period of wartime expansion (1941-1945), reaching its apogee
in 1945, has yet to be examined.
The hub of all miltary activity in the Port of New York (aside from the Brooklyn Navy Yard) was the U.S. Army's New York Port of Embarkation (NYPE), comprised of ten
port terminals specializing in everything from ammunition and POL (petroleum-oil-lubricants)
to overseas mail, and three staging areas which funneled over three million troops and
their equipment to the New York docks for deployment overseas. Check this page for additonal information about the NYPE.
Related Information can be found at the following WWW sites:
For more information, contact
- Joseph F. Meany Jr., Ph.D.
- Senior Historian
- New York State Museum
- Room 3097 CEC
- Albany, New York 12230
- Voice: (518) 486-2033
- E-mail: mailto:jmeany@mail.nysed.gov
This overview of the Port of New York and the NYPE is reprinted here courtesy of the New York State Museum.
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