City Planners Urged to Back A Container Port in Red Hook

A city official, labor leaders, longshoremen and Brooklyn businessmen turned out at City Hall hearing yesterday to urge approval of a container port in Red Hook.

The last time the plan came up for a public hearing, some of the neighborhood residents protested it with a well‐planned presentation at City Hall.

Yesterday a vastly expanded proposal came up before the City Planning Commission, and a group of longshoremen wearing white lapel buttons for identification gathered outside City Hall half an hour before the doors were opened to claim the first seats in the Board of Estimate chamber.

They cheered loudly later as Thomas W. Gleason, the president of the International Longshoremen's Association, suggested that even in a democdemocracy, where people must have their say, eight years of talking was more than sufficient.

“By God, somebody has to say this is the station where we get off at,” he shouted into the speaker's microphone.

Ken Patton, the Economic Development Administrator, who has successfully pushed for several major city projects in recent months, led off by urging approval of the 230‐acre project to reverse inroads by New Jersey into “New York City's once unchallenged preeminence in maritime commerce.”

“The proposed Red Hook peninsula industrial plan would create 500 new waterfront jobs and 2,200 jobs in such directly allied activities as trucking and warehousing,” Mr. Patton testified. “Four thousand existing jobs would be preserved.”

The container port, to be leased to the Port of New York Authority, would follow along the South Brooklyn shoreline from Baltic Street to the curve of Red Hook.

In other matters, the commission did the following:

¶Heard a spokesman for the Quakers complain that the day before they were to sell land they owned in the Midwood section of Brooklyn for $2‐million for a Health Insurance Plan hospital, the city moved to earmark it for a park. Now, he said, “there is a blight on our title” to the six‐acre site bounded by Washington cemetery, East Fourth Street, Avenue M and McDonald Avenue.

¶Listened to protests in behalf of the owners of a neighboring building to plans for a 46‐story office and apartment tower on the north side of 57th Street between Park and Lexington Avenue. The proposed structure would be permitted to exceed size limits in exchange for including a pedestrian arcade.