Port was there first

Joseph Bonney | May 8, 2009 4:23PM GMT

At the edge of New Orleans' French Quarter, the Gov. Nicholls Street Wharf occupies a site that's been in continuous maritime commerce since shortly after the city's founding in 1718. Now there's a controversy over using the site for ... maritime commerce.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports on not-in-my-backyard protests against plans to convert the 1960s-era breakbulk wharf into a cold-storage warehouse and transfer facility for New Orleans Cold Storage. NOCS, a 122-year-old exporter of frozen poultry and other products, has been trying for more than three years to regain dockside access it lost when Hurricane Katrina closed the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal to shipping.

NOCS says it is spending $45,000 a month to truck its cargo from its existing plant to Mississippi River wharves. Opponents say renovating the Gov. Nicholls site for NOCS would interfere with tourism and a plan to develop a four-mile riverfront park on obsolete wharves. Port officials are siding with advocates of maintaining a century-old business and its well-paying cargo jobs.

Regretfully this idea that port businesses interfere with commerce is not only prevelant in New Orleans, it is pervasive and all over the world. What folks must realize and obviously relearn that without transportation facilities and interchange points between modes i.e. docks, etc. tourism would ultimately not exist. There would be no products to buy, food to eat or hotels in which to lay their heads.

It can be argued that transportation is in fact the 'world's oldest profession'. In the days of the caves someone had to move the rocks, the sticks, the pelts for them to be used!!!! So my comment is therefore which came first? The ships (and their docking facilities) or The Tourists?

- By JNAGEL on 5/8/09