In a city with 656 miles of subway track, 468 subway stations, 346 miles of tunnels and aqueducts, 6,000 miles of water pipe, 88,000 miles of electric cabling, 6,600 miles of gas lines, 6,000 miles of sidewalk, more than 2,000 bridges, and 103,700 fire hydrants, the Cross Harbor Railway, with its 13.1 miles of track and a pair of battered and rat-infested “float bridges,” might not seem to be an impressive infrastructural item. But the funky railroad, which Greg Kisloff says has experienced some “very lean” years of late, finds itself strangely positioned to become, as its thin brochure boldly proclaims, the “float bridge to the 21st Century.”

That’s because, as almost everyone agrees, Brooklyn is an excellent place for the long-plotted “hub port,” which would bring back business lost to container ports like Port Elizabeth and Port Newark during the fifties and sixties. There’s no way Jersey can take the giant new superships, people say. The Kill Van Kull, which leads to the Jersey ports, has only a 45-foot draft before hitting bedrock; Brooklyn’s sandy channel has 80 feet, easy. Operating much in the manner of an airline “hub,” the port will serve as a dock for the big ships, which will off-load their wares there to be carried up and down the coast by a flotilla of smaller vessels. Once the hub port comes, people say, in Brooklyn, the fleet will always be in.

Key to the hub-port idea is the prospective rail-freight tunnel under New York Bay from Brooklyn to either Staten Island or New Jersey. The idea doesn’t really make sense without it. This is because New York City, the largest consumer market in the United States, has the worst rail infrastructure of any city in the country.

Although the following facts have become a mantra along the waterfront, to the uninitiated, the stats boggle the mind. To wit: While most major industrial centers handle freight at roughly a 60-40 truck-to-rail ratio, in New York something like 98 percent of all goods moves by truck; 2 percent by rail. This amounts to an astounding 30,000 extra trucks on the roads per day, pumping exhaust into the air, clogging up traffic, ripping the hell out of the roadways. It wouldn’t be this way if there were a freight-rail connection between New York and the rest of the country. But there isn’t. Just to cross the Hudson River, a freight train has to go 220 miles north to Selkirk, New York.

“People don’t know this, but when the Port Authority was created in 1921, it was for the express purpose of building a train tunnel under New York Harbor,” says Congressmen Jerrold Nadler, a hub-port and rail-freight obsessionist. You listen to the story and you begin to understand that while we might like to believe that august Promethean visions shaped the city, it is the scummy skullduggeries of long-dead politicians that often have the greatest lasting influence. After the Port Authority failed to dig the tunnel, the cause was taken up by New York’s then-mayor, Tammany minion John F. Hylan. Hylan’s tunnel was routed not to Jersey, as in the original plan, but to Staten Island, thereby keeping the project’s huge patronage under city (i.e., Hylan’s) control. Governor Al Smith balked at this. When Hylan resisted, Smith recruited Gentleman Jimmy Walker to run against the mayor in the upcoming Democratic primary, and that was it for John F. Hylan and his tunnel. The Depression and then World War II soon followed, and the New York Harbor rail tunnel became another little bit of the New York that never was.

“Skip ahead to the 1960s, when Robert Moses was building the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge,” Nadler continues. Though most people had forgotten the cross-harbor rail tunnel, Moses hadn’t. Having begun his epic career as Al Smith’s most brilliant lieutenant, Moses had Hylan’s original plans in his Randall’s Island office. As if to make sure the tunnel stayed dead, Moses, who abhorred trains of any type, located the shaftway Hylan had begun in 1924 and filled it in with the same dirt excavated during the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Of course, if the rail tunnel had been built 70 years ago, the Brooklyn waterfront wouldn’t have died and the place might already be the hub port. Now most significant political figures in the city support building the new tunnel (D’Amato and Moynihan have recently come onboard) even with the price hovering in the $2 billion range. Related bills also mount. The decaying Gowanus Expressway, originally expected to last at least 100 years, is barely hanging on after 50, largely because of those 30,000 extra trucks. Some say tear the loathsome roadway down, replace it with a tunnel, but that’ll cost upwards of $2.4 billion. The alternative is to rebuild the thing in place, engendering a decade of mind-frazzling detours.

When it comes to infrastructure, bricks and mortar are the least of it. Like ideas, the built city moves in cycles, often capriciously. It pays to follow the larger arc of things. This is something Dave Hendrickson knows well. A proud member of the sanitation department, Hendrickson gives tours at the 2,500-acre Fresh Kills garbage landfill, a piece of New York City infrastructure so spectacular that, along with the Great Wall of China, it is one of the few man-made objects that can be seen by astronauts orbiting the earth. A man who enjoys visiting the dump’s Christmas-tree-mulching facility because the smell reminds him of his childhood, Hendrickson says working at Fresh Kills, where the city currently dumps 13,000 tons of trash a day, has taught him “a respect for what people keep, what they throw away.”

To this end, Hendrickson tells the following story of New York City infrastructure: One chilly November afternoon, an elderly lady, described by Hendrickson as “elegant and meticulous-looking in a floral dress,” came to the dump in tears. In charge of the raffle at her Queens church, she’d inadvertently tossed out all the tickets. “She said she’d never be able to face the church people again,” Hendrickson recalls. “But sanitation is not haphazard. We can track things. I spread the load with her garbage over a 100-foot-square area up on the active bank, got down on my hands and knees with thousands of gulls flying around, and I found every single one of those raffle tickets. Then she started crying again. ‘You don’t know what you’ve found,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do,’ I said. ‘I found your raffle tickets.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you found my honesty and dignity. You gave me my life back, right here in this city dump.’”

Now Fresh Kills, which first opened in 1948 when the city decided to consolidate rubbish at a single dump site, is slated to close on December 31, 2001. Although the date seems uncomfortably imminent, too much political capital (primarily Mayor Giuliani’s and Governor Pataki’s) has been invested to back down now. What comes next boils down to one question: Where do you stash 13,000 tons of garbage a day? A: not anywhere near where I live, dude. With solid-waste removal a going concern in the hinterlands, New York’s garbage will end up far away (Virginia and Texas are vying). But as for establishing a system for getting it there -- upgrading garbage transfer stations in the city and creating new ones -- that is likely to precipitate some of the ugliest, most drawn-out battles the city has ever seen.

For his part, Dave Hendrickson says he will take the Fresh Kills closing in stride. He’s nearing retirement, anyway. Leachate-gas stench or no, fifteen years at Fresh Kills has been “a great experience,” the sanitation man says. Not that he’s in favor of keeping it open. Once he lived close to the dump, just on the other side of Richmond Avenue, but he moved his family to Rockland County. “Things get used up; if I learned anything from working here, it’s that,” Hendrickson says.

All of which made me think of Joseph Mitchell’s 1951 essay “The Bottom of the Harbor,” a good deal of which is set in the Fresh Kills area. Centering on his friend Mr. Zimmer, an employee of the Bureau of Marine Fisheries who roamed the then-thriving New York waterfront looking for shellfish poachers, Mitchell describes a Fresh Kills full of “pheasants, crows, marsh hawks, black snakes, muskrats, opossums, rats, and field mice,” a place where rabbis used to come to collect twigs and cuttings suitable for harvest festivals. It was here, Mitchell says, that Zimmer came to relax. Except now, his friend was worried. “At times, out in the marshes, Mr. Zimmer becomes depressed,” Mitchell wrote. “The marshes are doomed. The city has begun to dump garbage on them. . . . Eventually it will fill the whole area.”