Driving through Red Hook, the old docks district of Brooklyn, last weekend, I saw a very evocative sign on a building by the harbour: Waterfront Office.

Red Hook has a fair claim to be the setting for Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On The Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, about racketeering in the New York docks. The original script, which Kazan commissioned from Arthur Miller, was called The Hook. That script was later taken over after a dispute with the studio and renamed.

These days, a lot of the Red Hook docks are derelict and the district is being gradually gentrified (or not, if you believe a recent story in New York Magazine). One of the most visible signs of its transformation is the familiar blue and yellow outline of an Ikea store, which is due to open soon.

The sign made me reflect that my recent visits to Ikeas have all involved driving through old dock districts. I used to pass through the London docklands to reach the Ikea at Lakeside near West Thurrock in Essex. My closest Ikea in New York, until the Red Hook one opens, is in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.

To docklands historians, Port Elizabeth is most famous as the original US container port. Most of the trade from the old New York docks, including from Red Hook, eventually transferred to Port Elizabeth because it had a purpose-build container terminal. The tale is entertainingly told in The Box, Marc Levinson’s history of the shipping container.

I suppose many former docklands have in common that they are run down and you have to drive to reach them because they are not accessible by train. That was true of Canary Wharf until it was linked to the centre of London, first by the Docklands Light Railway and then the Jubilee line.

That makes them prime sites for big box retailers such as Ikea. When the transport links improve, they have the potential to become financial districts. But that is another story.

December 11th, 2007 in Retail | Permalink