NYC Waterfront Project Aims to Shift Freight from Truck to Barge

By Daniel Katzive (gCaptain) – 

New York City’s slow-moving efforts to get more freight off the city’s congested highways and onto the metropolis’s navigable waterways appeared to take an important step forward this week. Bronx-based material manufacturing and distribution group Con Agg Global has a plan to bring water-borne freight directly to the doorstep of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center and Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx, massive wholesale distribution centers currently served by over 10,000 trucks a day.

The initiative announced Tuesday by the city’s Economic Development Corporation will involve building a transload facility on the Bronx shoreline. The site is expected to significantly cut into the heavy truck traffic moving into the Hunts Point neighborhood by serving the food and beverage distribution businesses and construction industry facilities that dominate the neighborhood.

The first phase of the project, which is expected to be up and running quickly, will involve placing a crane barge on the shoreline at the site and transloading material from barges alongside to a receiving area on the land. The site is located on the Bronx shoreline adjacent to the Fulton Fish Market, in a space currently occupied by a parking lot abutting the East River, sandwiched between a Department of Correction prison barge and an unused sanitation department facility. Initial cargo heading into the facility might focus on aggregate for nearby construction projects but, according to Con Agg Global CEO Paul Granito, there is also strong interest in the food and beverage industry to use the facility in this initial stage. He estimates that phase one of the project will be able to take at least 1,000 truck trips off the road per month.

The second phase of the project, which will require additional approvals and a New York City Council resolution to allow for spud barges to be installed, would feature an inland standard barge with a modular pier design that the EDC says “will allow for rapid deployment, high capacity, and flexibility to adjust the design and layout based on evolving market demands for freight.” The design is intended to accommodate micro-freight streams, including cargo trikes and quads and passenger ferries “moonlighting” to deliver cargo during overnight hours. Bulk cargos and aggregate will also continue to be accommodated. Con Agg’s Granito told gCaptain he expects the approval process for this to be complete within six months.

New York City has long used its network of rivers, canals and bays to move residential waste, recycling materials, and scrap metal, and to bring in aggregates, fuel and cement. But with last-mile deliveries surging in the post-pandemic world and with the city’s highways and bridges choked with traffic, the Eric Adams administration launched an initiative in 2023 to increase use of the city’s waterways for freight. Progress has so far seemed slow, part of a national phenomenon of underused inland waterway resources.

A Request for Proposal launched by the EDC in 2024 sought input on upgrading six city-controlled sites using funds from a MARAD grant to accommodate micro freight deliveries. The RFP did not include any locations in Hunts Point, although one site was nearby in Oak Point. A year later, none of those sites have yet been built out.

The Con Agg project announced this week is not reliant on public funds. “We didn’t take a dime,” said Granito. “There’s no MARAD grant, there’s no public money, there’s no city initiative help.” The company has financing for the project from its equity shareholder BDT & MSD Partners and from shareholder William J. Sandbrook, a former Chairman and CEO of U.S. Concrete.

“We want to take this momentum and utilize it to make change, not do what everybody else has done, which is just talk about it and hear about it. We’re doing this,” said Granito.

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