The Queen Mary 2 sails into a changing harbor

There was a chilly wind and a thick mist in New York Harbor when the Queen Mary 2 arrived last week. Luckily there was also enough heavy breathing by promoters to keep everyone warm. Even the cynical New York media turned inordinately bubbly over the 151,400 tons of maritime nostalgia.

“She emerged on the horizon like a specter from a distant time,” panted a radio reporter on a media boat strategically parked near the Statute of Liberty as the QM2 glided by. The tabloid newspapers all had reporters aboard the big ship, and as she pitched and rolled during a storm in the North Atlantic the Post’s gossip columnist, Cindy Adams, offered urgent steerage-class dispatches: “Passengers upfront where Britannia has been ruling the waves are icky-poo!” That particular report was accompanied by a photo of Adams in a ship boutique holding aloft an Hermes clutch. Judging from her weak smile, the caption should have read: the most expensive barf bag in the history of transatlantic travel.

Certainly, the Queen Mary 2 is all about excess. It is now the longest passenger ship in the world. It’s also the widest, the tallest, the most expensive to build and the costliest to board. From a small boat in the harbor, the Godzilla appeared imposing, with helicopters, tugs and security boats hovering like gnats on her tail.

But none of that compared with the hype around her maiden visit to New York. The flagship of the Cunard Line was feted with an entire weekend of waterborne publicity -- one irresistible photo opportunity after another. There was an on-board gala and a 24-hour junket out at sea.

It all was to culminate Sunday night in a bang-up departure with the QM2 and her older but smaller Cunard sister, the Queen Elizabeth 2, leaving port in tandem after idling, side by side, in front of the Statue of Liberty under a blaze of fireworks. That would certainly be one for the history books as well as the $17-billion cruise line industry, which is positively giddy with its success right now despite shipboard viruses and other setbacks post-Sept. 11.

There was a time when it would not have been necessary to demand people pay so much attention to a great maritime moment in Manhattan. For most of its history the waterfront defined New York City, and for long periods of time it was the most important port in the world.

As the Queen Mary skimmed up the Hudson from the tip of Manhattan, John Maxtone-Graham, a maritime historian who was on this voyage and has sailed into the port at least 300 times, said despite a glorious crossing -- unlike the Post’s gossip columnist he was delighted to experience the sturdy liner up against the frothing sea -- he also felt a tinge of “ineffable sadness.”

“Starting from where the World Trade Center once was you see stumps floating above the water,” he said. “And then it’s a parade of burned-out piers.”

Now 75, he remembers the port that was, from childhood memories and a lifetime of scholarship, and today he sees a waterfront struggling with reinvention.

Entry to New World

From the beginning, the Dutch were drawn to New Amsterdam, as they named the first colony, not because of the land but because it was next to one of the great natural harbors on Earth.

“The Dutch perceived the world in terms of water, and they understood the Hudson and the harbor were the best water access to the interior of the New World,” said Russell Shorto, author of “The Island

at the Center of the World,”

a new history of the Dutch colony. Free trade from that waterway helped create a melting-pot society that Shorto said shaped not only New York but also all of America.

By the mid-19th century, Manhattan had taken off as a commercial and cultural capital, and depending on their pocketbooks, every New Yorker had some connection to someone sailing somewhere. Over the years, artists, writers and later filmmakers reinforced the

romance of a voyage through New York’s port whether it was by industrious immigrants arriving on Ellis Island or the starchy upper class aboard an ocean liner. The images endured -- ladies wrapped in fur squeezed into cabins drinking champagne, men in suits with tails smoking cigars while a band played on deck, newsboys in caps and shirtless workers on the docks.

But sometime after World War II, the waterfront began changing. First, it was lost to a girdle of highways that ringed the eastern and western sides of the island. People couldn’t look out as easily at arriving ships nor hear their deep-throated whistles, and goods that used to come in on container ships were brought in by truck.

Then in October 1958, the first commercial jet flew to London. Cunard came up with a new slogan designed to counter the new rush to airline travel, “Getting there is half the fun.” But even the rich defected to such a degree that by 1963 the grand ocean liners, like the original Queen Mary, now a hotel off Long Beach, served fewer than 200 passengers on some voyages with a crew of 1,200, according to Bill Miller, author of 60 books about ships and a curator at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.

“There are horrible stories of one or two ladies sitting alone in a grand ballroom having tea as the band on the Queen Mary played sadly,” said Miller.

In no time the great ships became dinosaurs, and the piers on the Hudson lost their magic. While there had once been 100 working piers lining the island, by 1975 it was down to three.

But in a city that loves a comeback story, especially when it involves down-and-out real estate values, the Port of New York was destined for renewal. It was, however, to change profoundly over the second half of the last century. In terms of commerce, the activity moved away from congested Manhattan to the piers of New Jersey. In the meantime, the city’s tie to the sea was being slowly reinvented as an entertainment center.

There are still crumbling piers and rusted factory yards edging Manhattan. But on the other side of the roadway, the coast is now teeming with new construction of apartments and renovated warehouses. And there is also a relatively new 30-acre sports village built on four piers. The Chelsea Piers, the very place the Titanic was to have ended her maiden voyage in 1912, is a now kids’ haven, featuring skating rinks, basketball courts and bowling alleys, never mind a golf course and restaurants for the parents.

New York remains eager to once again dominate other ports for the competitive cruise business. Right now, New York is only the fifth-largest port in terms of passenger volume, after Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Port Canaveral and L.A. But in a bit of timed self-promotion, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and two major cruise lines announced just before Queen Mary 2 pulled into town that they’d cut a deal that would enable the city to underwrite a $52-million redevelopment of the decrepit West Side Passenger Terminals. Money will also be used for a new super-berth for this generation of mammoth ships like QM2, which had more than 100 feet of her backside hanging out beyond Pier 92 into the river last week.

The giant cruise liners have returned to an unprepared city that doesn’t even have a pier long enough for them. That’s embarrassing, yet understandable. But it’s not as surprising as what the Queen Mary 2 dwarfed only three piers down -- a droop-nosed Concorde jet. It has been mothballed, a museum piece on a barge going nowhere.

Who would have thought 30 years ago that the era of supersonic jet travel would be over and that New York would be spending an April weekend, 92 years almost to the day after the Titanic sank, gushing over a new ocean liner?