A day away from the North River and visiting Brooklyn provided a bit of a different perspective on activity in New York Harbor. While parks and recreation have also come to dominate much of the Brooklyn waterfront, there are still pockets of commercial and industrial activity, much more so than we see along the Hudson now.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard is no longer building boats, but there remains an active boat yard with drydocks which seems to get some significant business.

South of the Navy Yard, the waterfront is occupied by Con Ed facilities and then the Brooklyn Bridge Park. The Port Authority Docks south of the park look to be mainly used as trucking depots, though some tanker barges and at least one tug are tied up there.

Things get more interesting in Red Hook, where an active container terminal is operating, as well as a cruise ship terminal. The AS Pauline, a Liberian-flagged modest sized 2526 TEU feedermax container ship was unloading Wednesday. She arrived from Costa Rica and Panama this week and was on her way to Philadelphia by evening. We visited the excellent stewards of the historic Mary Whalen tanker based there, a floating museum which serves as a cultural center for the neighborhood and a rallying point for maintaining maritime industrial capacity on the waterfront.

As you move south through the Red Hook area, the true scale of New York Harbor becomes visible in a way we never see from the North River.