I gazed up at towering tanks, dodged speeding forklifts in the yard, peered into warehouses filled with steel and watched immigration officers buzz around ships. And I learned that, no matter how static it may appear from the Q Bridge, New Haven Harbor is not merely a set of abstract forms to be viewed from a distance. It is very much alive. The Shipping News Hundreds of ships dock at the Port of New Haven each year. Europe, South America, Africa, Japan.
Tankers carry oil, gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene, diesel and other chemicals.
It was Jim Schine who opened my eyes to the vitality of New Haven's working waterfront. Schine is director of sales and marketing for Logistec Connecticut, a stevedoring company at New Haven Terminal. Instead, I meet a former psychiatric counselor with kind eyes and a big office in the renovated top floor of an old warehouse on Waterfront Street. Every day he gets to look out on a vista of bright-white fuel tanks shimmering against a spectacular sweep of Sound. Sometimes everyone from the whole floor comes crowding in here just to get a look.