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 a short block is long. (Far more immense than any building in Red Hook, they’re rivaled in size only by the Amazon fulfillment centers that have recently appeared on the waterfront.)

The latest wave of frustration comes in the wake of the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s splashy September announcement touting new agreements with the three largest global cruise operators, Carnival, Norwegian, and MSC. The annual economic impact of opening the BCT and its Manhattan counterpart would be upwards of $420 million, the EDC claimed. Against this full-steam-ahead enthusiasm, Avilés organized the public forum for her constituents to voice their concerns to EDC staffers—led by Mikelle Adgate, senior vice president of government and community relations—who were seated, panel-style, at a long table opposite the tight-knit crowd of sixty-ish District 38ers.

A slate of local residents presented topics ranging from traffic mitigation (an issue when upwards of 6,000 passengers arrive in a neighborhood of 10,000 with no subway to speak of) to shore power (dockside electrical hookups as a cleaner alternative to noxious diesel) to economic development (the terminal’s post-pandemic reopening has reportedly coincided with declining business for local shops and restaurants instead of a promised boost). Armed with facts, figures, anecdotes, and anger, each speaker trotted out a list of grievances, often echoed by a chorus of audience support. Their demands were already loosely codified in Intro 1050, but the performative democracy was cathartic nonetheless. Activist Karen Blondel was among the non-scheduled speakers whose fiery comments inspired a burst of applause, as was Carolina Salguero, whose maritime non-profit Portside is permanently docked in the shadow of the Queen Mary 2 and its ilk. (Salguero occasionally documents cruise ship activity on Portside’s Instagram account.)

The EDC crew, for their part, looked and sounded defensive, shifting uncomfortably in their seats as community members chewed them out. When was the last proper traffic study done? What happened to that $750,000 previously allocated for capital improvements? Why can’t the city mandate or enforce regulations for cruise operators to connect their ships to shore power—the subject of a 2019 New York Times exposé—or to provide shuttle buses for disembarking cruise passengers?

Of course, it had been clear from the outset that there would be many more questions than answers; Avilés and her staff anticipated a lively conversation. “If we have burning questions that we want to ask, we’re going to put them in the ‘Ideas Bin,’” she said, pointing to a whiteboard labeled as such. “I originally called it a ‘Parking Lot,’” she quipped, adding another metaphor to the mix, “but that’s not environmentally friendly.”