The ships in one of the world’s most active ports make a nice image in this shot of the Upper New York Bay.

Waters this close to New York City and New Jersey we expect to be polluted, and of course they are, with coliform bacteria and high nitrogen runoff leading to huge algae blooms that choke out animals and more complex species of plants. Trending upwards.

Did you know that they used to farm oysters in New York harbor? It’s not safe for people to eat oysters caught there now.

By some standards the water quality might be better than in 1883, when this cartoon was published in response to several large ships running aground on harbor debris.

People thought about water quality in those days in terms of big things, things you could see. Things you could crash a ship into.

Now, we’re concerned mostly with tiny things. Things you need a gas chromatogram and a stable power supply to see.

Things that crash into you.

Inbound: Automobiles. Fuel Supertanker. Container Ships. Outbound: Garbage. Battleship (upper right). From this height, the pattern on the pier is made up of thouands of new cars awaiting shipment at the Auto Terminal.

Cities concentrate populations and make it more efficient to distribute resources like food, energy, and information. New York is a big city, although number twelve in the most populous cities in the world. It’s still the biggest city in the United States, which for lots of people is good enough.

As we’ve shown, the surrounding megalopolis moves a huge amount of passengers and cargo through this vicinity on rails, roads, and by air, but putting things in a boat on the water remains one of the most efficient ways to move stuff around.

It probably always will be.

One of the things they move a lot of is New York City’s twenty thousand tons of garbage, baked fresh each day. That’s almost fifteen billion pounds of garbage per year. Mountains of garbage, day in and day out. Most efficiently moved by barge. You’d think that they would move most of it that way.

Since the Fresh Kills landfill closed, there’s really been nowhere to send it. Which amounts to sending it everywhere. Mostly by truck.

Remember that garbage barge from 1987? Fodder for late night TV comedy for over 6,000 miles.

That barge held 3,200 tons, or less than a day’s worth of trash in 1987.

Since then, it’s been over 18 years. 6,654 days. A thousand flotillas of barges. My free giveaway calculator goes into scientific notation.

It’s got to go somewhere.

The city was trying to build a barge handling facility in Staten Island, but the residents there are opposed. One community in Ohio was offered $600,000 per year in order to allow a landfill within their jurisdiction.

One third of all that garbage that has to be moved, then burned, buried, or both, is paper. It’s half of all municipal waste.

To make a ton of paper requires seventeen full grown trees. Thousands of gallons of water, of toxic chlorine. A ton of coal. You can get about 7,000 daily newspapers from a ton of paper.

The New York Times claimed a daily circulation of 1,136,433 newspapers in March of 2005. At that rate, that’s 2,754 trees per day. More than one million trees a year.

Pulped.

Shouts out to Aaron, Matt, John, Ian, Doug, and The Anonymice.

In the American consciousness, few places evoke images of urban blight like those recalled when Newark, New Jersey is mentioned. You may have been there before, but you probably didn’t go on purpose, and most likely you weren’t staying.

Maybe this has something to do with the Newark Riot in 1967. Maybe it’s because Newark is the largest city in New Jersey, or that it’s nicknamed the brick city, not that you’ve ever heard anyone call it that.

Maybe it’s because there are only five major taxpayers in the city, which ranks dead last among major New Jersey cities for collecting taxes owed.

One of the very best things people say about Newark is that it is only twenty minutes from Manhattan. This proximity has made transportation Newark’s largest industry, and helps to consistently rank Newark among the most financially stable of New Jersey’s five largest cities. Somehow this prosperity has also made it one of the bleakest places in New Jersey to live, ranking 12th on the national list of most dangerous cities from the people who count this stuff. That’s remarkable if only considering the size of the city. Of course, the population sizes don’t take into account the sheer volume of goods and services that move through the region.

Operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bi-state agency, the Port of New Jersey is just one part of an inland distribution system that promises to be able to deliver shipped goods within one day of arrival to over one hundred million consumers. We’re looking at one key piece in a massive merchandise distribution machine.

This image shows Port Newark as the ultimate commercial hub. Superhighway, railway, jet aircraft, marine cargo containers, passengers, automobiles, and military hardware all come together in one sweep of the eye. The machine is in motion, moving goods around — you can see a few ships in port and cars parked everywhere.

The people that actually live in Newark, who number around 280,000 souls, reap few benefits from all this commercial activity nearby. Below is a representative overhead photo of the town of Newark itself. Note the harsh shadows cast by Soviet-style monolithic high rises laid down in neat rows.

In the above photo the angled street at bottom right is Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. The park on the right side of the image with the neat criss-crossed paths is Lincoln Park and is one of three or four small public parks in town. Most of the green in town that you can see from space comes from the large cemeteries on the west edge of the town, which you’ll drive right past if you take the Garden State Parkway North.

The majority of Newark that is not devoted to transit and shipping consists of steel and glass office buildings, rough neighborhoods, and abandoned shopping districts.

It’s easy to understand why the city looks like it does in the above image, and why you probably don’t want to live there.

"The Federal Housing Administration redlined virtually all of Newark, preferring to back up mortgages in the white suburbs… Billed as transportation improvements, pure and simple, I-280, the New Jersey Turnpike, and I-78, harmed Newark as well… Because the new infrastructure allowed middle class people to commute into [New York City]."

"…Newark made some serious mistakes with public housing and urban renewal. Across administrations, the city leaders of Newark saw the federal government’s offer to pay for 100% of the costs of housing projects as a blessing. While other cities were skeptical about putting so many poor and socially dysfunctional individuals together… Newark avidly pursued federal dollars. Eventually, Newark would have a higher percentage of its residents in public housing than any other American city." nationmaster encyclopedia

In the above image you can see the Elizabeth Marine Terminal to the south of Port Newark.

The Newark Liberty International Airport with it’s trademark oval access road from U.S. 1 is visible to the west. This airport’s longest runway is only 9300 feet, which is considered rather short for international traffic and makes for some hair-raising takeoffs and landings with larger aircraft.

Towards the top of the image, above the railroad tracks but below the river, is the city of Newark itself.

You can actually get to recognize urban blight from space. It’s easy to see disadvantaged places once you get to recognize them. How many can you make out in Newark?

Looking around at blighted areas from space makes me realize just what a great job the SimCity 4 team did representing neighborhoods in decline.

There are three piers on the east side of the above image, which isn’t Newark at all but Bayonne, New Jersey. Two piers jut out and are easily recognized, the third is just above these two and is a military terminal.

The northernmost of the two main, rectangular piers is the Auto Marine Terminal, which is dedicated exclusively to vehicle imports and exports. BMW and freight companies lease space there to prep their new vehicles for shipment and put them on trains for the American market, or to export them overseas. Guess which happens more often?

Here’s a close up of this terminal with thousands of new cars destined for the U.S. coated in protective white plastic. The U.S. imports the cars, and imports the fuels to put into the cars. The pollution that results from burning all this fuel stays in the air, water, and our bodies.

The lower or southern pier from above is the Military Ocean Terminal, which was recommended for closure in 1995 but is still open in some sort of quasi-official way.

"Military Ocean Terminal, Bayonne, NJ [MOTBY] is a unique strategic asset. No other port on the east or gulf coasts, commercial or military, can duplicate its combination of advantages in the support of power projection from the continental United States without the disruption of commercial port activities. This was amply demonstrated during the Gulf war and operations in Somalia and Haiti. Dozens of units shipped through MOTBY as well as outsized cargo such as M1A2 tanks from as far as Fort Hood, TX." Global Security

In the image of the above military terminal, you can see a ship of some kind sitting in the enormous dry dock at the end of the pier. The ship is dwarfed by the size of the dock.

This whole area, built on landfill, is an EPA Superfund site. It’s contaminated with hazardous waste. There are at least two 800 gallon tanks of the stuff still buried in the ground.

South of those two main piers is an enormous facility for fuel storage, transport, and refining. Previously operated by Exxon, this area located on East 22nd Street is also one big superfund site. Toxic wastes, again. This place really looks the part, and more than likely will never be cleaned up due to the costs involved.

New Jersey is known as The Garden State. We used to call this a tank farm. Note the lack of any of the security apparatus that you find around prisons or military bases. No gate towers or limited access. Certainly there must be a fence?

In this view of the region you can see Upper New York Bay as well as lower Manhattan. Above the boat traffic on the bay, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island welcome ships to New York.

Here you can see the entire Island of Manhattan to the northeast, and make out Central Park. The island directly south of the New Jersey port is Staten Island, by far the least populated and most remote of the five boroughs of New York City.

You can zoom up from this image to see the incredible size and scope of moving almost six million cargo containers through per year. In recent years, those cargo containers have been mostly full of manufactured goods from Asia.