THE BUSH TERMINAL
South Brooklyn, New York City.
NEW FREIGHT TERMINAL WAREHOUSE AT ROCHESTER
Built by the Buffalo, Rochester, & Pittsburgh Railway.
A modern combination of freight house and storage warehouse.
There is, on one of the harbor-shores of metropolitan New York, a city within a city. It is located in Brooklyn, to be exact, and it occupies somewhat more than a half-mile of waterfront—a waterfront cut into long deep-water piers, of the most modern type and running far out into the harbor. Back of these piers and connected with them by means of an intricate, but extremely well-planned system of industrial railroad, rise many buildings of steel and stone and concrete, almost all of them built to a single type and differing only in the minor details of their construction. On the many floors of this group of buildings are myriad separate industries, widely diverse as to character and product but all of them capable of concentrated location. Together they employ many thousands of men and women and the high-grade freight which they send out each day would pay a king’s ransom.
In other days the greater number of these industries were scattered about both Brooklyn and the Manhattan boroughs of New York. As a rule they were remote from both freight houses and sidings. The freight-terminal situation of New York, owing to the peculiar physical formation of the city and its segregation from the mainland by several great navigable rivers, the upper harbor, and the Sound, is most difficult of operation. All the railroads find it necessary to lighter their freight over these navigable streams, either upon car-floats or in other forms of vessels. And, even under the most favorable operating conditions of light freight traffic, there is constant danger of congestion.
But to a manufacturer situated on one of the narrow sidestreets of either Manhattan or Brooklyn, the situation was infinitely worse. His problem was to even reach the freight houses along the watersides of the town—a problem to be imperfectly solved by the use of trucks. Fifty trucks in a narrow street, crowding and jostling, mean infinite congestion and loss of time. Add to this the prima-donna-like temperament of the average truck-driver, showing itself in constant and protracted strikes, and you can see why the manufacturers have flocked not only to that great industrial city in South Brooklyn, but to others like it which have begun to spring up in and around metropolitan New York. Not only is the trucking expense entirely eliminated—the freight cars are waiting in the great community shipping rooms in the ground floor of the very factory—but heat and light and power are alike brought to a fixed and reasonable cost. And the newest of these manufacturing buildings are fabricated so strongly that it is both possible and practicable to raise a loaded box car to any of their floors—to the manufacturer’s individual shipping room, if you please.
Here is an idea instantly adaptable to the freight terminal of any railroad. A remarkably progressive small railroad—the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh—has recently built a freight terminal of this very sort at Rochester. And there is hardly an important city reached by an important railroad that does not offer many opportunities for the development of freight terminals of this sort, terminals which, like the Grand Central station, would bring direct revenue to the railroad which built them. In this hour when the cost of foodstuffs is occupying so large a portion of public attention, when a large part of the problem lies in the marketing and storage facilities, or the lack of them, it might be possible to develop the freight terminal as both a cold-storage plant and a market. And all of this would tend to bring additional revenue to the railroad, as well as to simplify greatly, if not to solve entirely, some of the great transportation and terminal problems which are today troubling our cities and our larger towns and which are making their food costs mount rapidly to heights which the imagination has heretofore failed to grasp.