The Brooklyn Pier Battle Escalates - January 27, 2006 - The New York Sun - NY Newspaper
The cocoa standoff in Brooklyn escalated into a frenzied exchange of accusations yesterday following word that the city had backed off yet another deal that would have kept $25 million worth of chocolate in New York.Three companies have been negotiating with the city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to unload nearly 15,000 tons of cocoa beans into Brooklyn warehouses. The standoff started two weeks ago, after the Belgian ship Freeway entered New York harbor and was not given a place to deposit its cargo on the crowded Red Hook port.
Company officials said the city had offered early yesterday to let the Freeway unload its cargo onto a Red Hook pier on an emergency basis, and then use another pier at 39th Street in Sunset Park for future cocoa shipments. But last night, the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation angrily denied making that proposal, lambasting the Red Hook port operator, American Stevedoring, for incompetence
“They're not being good partners, and I don't understand why anyone would want to do business with them,” the corporation's president, Andrew Alper, said. Mr. Alper said he was “baffled” by American Stevedoring's mismanagement of its port, and accused the company of running a disinformation campaign and “squatting” on another pier that it doesn't control. The city never offered the emergency use of the Red Hook pier, Mr. Alper said, and its earlier proposal for the 39th Street pier, which won't be available for another week, remained on the table.
Meanwhile, the Stevedoring company unloaded some of the Freeway's cocoa onto one of its piers yesterday, but the owner of the cocoa, Blommer Chocolate, expressed impatience with the city and said it was ready to take the rest of the shipment out of New York. The city killed a previous deal for the company to unload its cocoa at another Red Hook pier earlier this week.
A director at Blommer, Karl Walk, said the offer of the 39th Street pier was not acceptable.
“Thirty-ninth Street is not a short-term option, and I will be moving that ship,” Mr. Walk said. He said the Freeway could sail for another East Coast port by Friday night, and that the cocoa shipments behind it would also be rerouted.
On a tangentially related note, for some reason, folks who don't live near the Blommer Chocolate factory universally adore the smell pollution. We live within a mile, and sometimes wish to smell air that doesn't reek of over-roasted chocolate. Apparently, this makes us terrorists, or 'stupid liberals', or other vitriol. Whew, got that off my chest.
