The contenders for New York\u2019s top job appeared at the annual meeting of the Metropolitan Waterfront Association, which held its meeting aboard Hornblower Infinity<\/i> – tethered to the pier in the morning, and then cruising around Manhattan in the afternoon.<\/p>\n
Like any high profile political contest, the crowded field will be winnowed down through a war of primary votes and financial attrition. The candidates looked good: well-dressed and well-coiffed, and well-spoken.<\/p>\n
There were various shades of plans for ferries around the harbour, and some talk of the widely-imagined cross-harbour tunnel that would revive the Brooklyn docks.<\/p>\n
The MWA assembled a group of influential planners and urban experts in its efforts to guide the politicians; its fund-raising infrastructure is first rate. Yet, looking around the room, during my moments of non-concentration during the political-speak, there were not very many business faces that I recognised. Sadly, one MWA guiding light and major financial supporter, John Neu (of the scrap metal and one-time shipowning behemoth Hugo Neu & Sons) had passed away about a month before the meeting.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve written about the importance of networks around port communities, indeed New York gets high marks for bringing together a group of responders who ably handled two emergencies: Irene in 2011 and the bigger sister Sandy in 2012.<\/p>\n
The guy who would get my vote for Mayor (if I were still an in-town resident) would be John Catsimitides, a self-made billionaire retailing magnate who hangs out with Greek shipowners and envisions a highway of ferries and a burgeoning cruise ship port.<\/p>\n
Catsimitides, who also owns a fuel dealer located on Newtown Creek – an industrial waterway separating Brooklyn and Queens – is not considered an electable candidate by some observers. That\u2019s really a shame, because in a city where the waterfront is ‘out of sight and out of mind’, a man of vision (with the harbour very much in his sights) would do a lot to further the dialogue between groups like the MWA, and the business community, including leaders (not facility managers) of maritime related businesses.<\/p>\n
As luck would have it, maritime lawyer- and banker-dominated New York Maritime (NYMAR) has been recently making noises about building such a coalition across the harbour, including forging ties with politicians. Bring it on, I say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In New York, last year\u2019s Hurricane Sandy has been a game-changer in many ways: a recent panel featuring candidates in the upcoming Mayoral race showed that waterfront issues have moved to the top tier of issues facing the candidates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-new-yorker"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1970"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}