Tied to the Mississippi Valley by nearly 14,000 miles of navigable
waterways, and the largest port on the gulf coast and the most
centrally situated with respect to the Latin-American and Oriental
trade, New Orleans is naturally a market of deposit. The development of
the river service, in which the government set the pace in 1918, is
restoring the north and south flow of commerce, after a generation of
forced haul east and west, along the lines of greatest resistance; and
New Orleans has become the nation's second port. Its import and export
business in 1920 amounted to a billion dollars.
Ninety per cent of the nation's wealth is produced in the Valley, of
which New Orleans is the maritime capital. It is the source of supply
of wheat, corn, sugar, lumber, meat, iron, coal, cotton oil,
agricultural implements, and many other products. It is a market for
the products of Latin-America and the Orient.
With the co-ordination of river, rail and maritime facilities, and
sufficient space for development, it is inevitable that New Orleans
should become a mighty manufacturing district. Such enterprises as coke
ovens, coal by-product plants, flour mills, iron furnaces, industrial
chemical works, iron and steel rolling mills, shipbuilding and repair
plants, automobile factories and assembling plants, soap works, packing
plants, lumber yards, building material plants and yards, warehouses of
all kinds, etc., would be encouraged to establish here if given the
proper facilities, and the Industrial Canal is the answer to this need,
for under the laws of Louisiana private industries can not acquire or
lease property on the river front. Even before the completion of the
Canal, the dream has been partly realized--with the establishment of
two large shipyards on the Canal, which otherwise would have gone
somewhere else, and the building of the army supply base on the same
waterway, largely due to the enterprise of the port.
As Colonel E. J. Dent, U.S. district engineer, said before the members'
council of the Association of Commerce, February 17, 1921, the
Industrial Canal will be the means of removing the handicaps on New
Orleans' foreign trade. "I hold no brief for the Industrial Canal," he
continued, "but speaking as one who has no interest in it but who has
studied the question deeply, I will say that five years from now, if
you develop the Industrial Canal as it should be developed, you will be
wondering how on earth you ever got along without it."
Before the constitutional convention of Louisiana, on April 4, 1921, he
elaborated this thought as follows:
"The Industrial Canal will furnish to New Orleans her greatest need. It
should be possible to build docks there where the entire cargo for a
ship may be assembled. Under present conditions in the river it is
often necessary for a ship to go to three or four docks to get a
complete cargo.
"Last year there passed through the port of New Orleans 11,000,000 tons
of freight valued at $1,100,000,000. This required 1,000 loaded freight
cars a day passing over the docks, fifteen solid trainloads of freight
each day. The inbound freight was about 5,000,000 tons and the outbound
about 6,000,000. This is extraordinarily well balanced for any port in
the United States. This would mean about 5,000 steamers of an average
capacity of 2,000 tons.
"The proper place to assemble a cargo is on the docks. Last year the
Dock Board allowed but seven days for assembling the cargo for a
ship--only seven days for assembling 250 carloads of stuff. Then last
year the Dock Board would not assign a ship a berth until it was within
the jetties. These are some of the difficulties.
"What New Orleans needs is 50 to 100 per cent more facilities for her
port. Last summer the port of New Orleans was congested, but she held
her own because other ports were congested. But that may not occur
again. If you want to hold your own you must improve your facilities."
Wharves can be built a great deal cheaper on the fixed-level canal,
with its stable banks. And that is the only place specialized
industries can secure water frontage.
Sooner or later the government will adopt the free port system, by
which other countries have pushed their foreign trade to such heights.
Free ports have nothing to do with the tariff question. They are simply
zones established in which imports may be stored, re-packed,
manufactured and then exported without the payment of duties in the
first place, duties for the refund of which the present law makes
provision, but only after vexatious delays and expensive red tape.
Precautions are taken to prevent smuggling. In the preliminary
investigations and recommendations made by the Department of Commerce,
New York, San Francisco and New Orleans have been designated as the
first free ports that should be established. With the ample space it
offers for expansion, the Industrial Canal is the logical location for
the free zone.
Counting the $15,000,000 contract of the Doullut & Williams Shipyard,
the $5,000,000 contract of the Foundation Company Shipyard, the
$13,000,000 army supply base, the Industrial Canal has already brought
$33,000,000 of development to New Orleans, 60 per cent more than the
cost of the undertaking. More than half of this was for wages and
material purchased in New Orleans. The state has gained hundreds of
thousands of dollars in taxes. About half the money spent on the
Industrial Canal was wages; and helped to increase the population,
force business to a new height, raise the value of real estate, and
make New Orleans the financial stronghold of the South.
What indirect bearing on bringing scores of other industries to New
Orleans, which did not require a location on the waterway, the building
of the Industrial Canal has had, there is no way of ascertaining.
Since the work was begun the Dock Board has received inquiries from a
hundred or so large enterprises regarding the cost of a site on the
canal. That they have not established there is due to the fact that the
Canal has not yet been completed, and the Dock Board has announced no
policy.
It is now working on that question with representatives of the
Association of Commerce, Joint Traffic Bureau, Clearing House
Association, Cotton Exchange, Board of Trade, and Steamship
Association.
There is no use trying to guess at what the policy will be. It is too
big a problem, and must be worked out very carefully, with reference to
a confusing tangle of cross-interests.
Two principles have already been categorically laid down by President
Hudson and endorsed by the Dock Board at an open meeting of April 5,
1921, with the commercial and industrial interests of the city,
planning for the policy of the Canal:
First, that the development of the Canal shall not be at the expense of
the river. Wharf development will be pushed on the river to meet the
legitimate commercial demands of the port. No one is to be forced on
the Canal. That would hurt the port. It is not thought that such forced
development would be necessary, and the Canal will be kept open for the
specialized industries that can best use the co-ordination of the
river, rail and maritime facilities.
Second, that the control of the property along the Canal, owned by the
Dock Board, will not go out of the hands of the Board. There will be
long-term leases--up to ninety-nine years, but no outright sale.
Furthermore, the private land on the other side of the Dock Board's
property will not be allowed to be developed at the expense of the
state's interests. So the frontage on the Canal will be developed
before there is any extensive construction of lateral basins and slips.
What will be the rate charged for a site? Will it be based on the
actual cost of the Canal and its maintenance? Or will the state
consider it a business investment like a road or street, and charge the
property owners thereon less than the cost of construction, collecting
the difference in the general progress? That, too, is a question which
calls for considerable study before it can be answered.
With the Industrial Canal open, sites available on long leases to
business enterprise, and with our tax laws relating to the processes of
industry and commerce revised and made more favorable, New Orleans will
enter a period of expansion and development on a scale hardly yet
dreamed of by her most far-visioned citizens, with enlarged profit and
opportunity for all her people.
New taxable wealth will be created rapidly. New needs for taxable
property will arise. The tax burden on all will be distributed more
widely and when contrasted with the earning power of such property will
become less and less of a burden.
This will be so because the water frontage through which the Canal is
being created for the attraction of many enterprises which cannot
locate on the river front, is all within the limits of the city of New
Orleans.
With this Canal in operation, New Orleans will possess to the fullest
degree the three great systems of port operation: Public ownership and
operation of the river harbor facilities; public ownership of the land
and private operation of facilities on the Industrial Canal; and
private ownership of the land and private operation of the facilities
on the new channel to the sea.
No other port in the country has the capacity for this trinity of port
systems.
No other port possesses such a hinterland as is embraced within the
Mississippi Valley, nor so extensive and so complete a system of
easy-grade railroads and navigable waterways penetrating its
hinterland.
No other port holds so strategic a position in the path of the new
trade routes connecting the region of greatest productivity with the
new markets of greatest promise in Latin-America and the Orient.
[Illustration: LOCK GATE
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