Cruise Control

“I keep telling everyone, we cannot eat Thanksgiving dinner entirely—we have to do it one bite at a time,” caveated Councilmember Alexa Avilés in her opening remarks at a recent public meeting that she convened at Red Hook’s Joseph Miccio Community Center on a chilly winter weeknight. The turkey, in her folksy metaphor, was either the gargantuan passenger vessels that frequent the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (BCT) or Intro 1050, which aims to mitigate the environmental impact of those very vessels on the otherwise sleepy seaside neighborhood. Avilés originally proposed the bill in 2022 (it hit the docket in May 2023), but the cruise terminal has attracted controversy since it opened in 2006; for one thing, then-borough president Marty Markowitz got a free six-day cruise out of the deal.

As a former longtime Red Hook resident, I know how surreal it can be to glimpse one of these behemoths at the end of Pioneer Street. Turned on end, a cruise liner would easily equal the height of the Chrysler Building; even in their normal orientation, the vessels are nearly as tall as …