The piers are busy, from Coal Bunder, where more than a million tonnes of coal for regional power plants are unloaded annually; to Lakdi Bunder, with its timber market; to Darukhana, where workers cut up ships in less-than-ideal safety conditions for £3 a day.
So what happens to that work?" That question echoes on the old bunders, or piers, near Mazgaon Dock.
It's the artist David Wojnarowicz photographed by his lover and collaborator Peter Hujar, cruising on the piers on the Hudson River, off New York's meatpacking district.
"It's a huge investment that is teaching us a lot about management skills in a foreign country," says Fu, who has overseen the remodelling and expansion of the piers now controlled by Cosco under the 35-year concession.
Built of 200,000 specially designed polyethylene cubes normally used in the yachting industry for pontoons, the 16 metre-wide piers will float on the lake.
There are two-up-two-downs in the shadows of block-long warehouses, cobblestone streets with highway views, fishermen casting lines off piers as container ships rumble by, and―my destination―a humble soccer and baseball pitch surrounded by housing projects.Semi-professional soccer teams began playing on this pitch in the late 1960s.
Sloping, unfenced sides will allow boats to ride up onto the piers so promenaders can alight.
The port is being improved, with five new piers and several barges, including a crane barge.
IT SHOULD be among the most beautiful cityscapes on the west coast: a mural of distant mountains, piers jutting into sun-flecked Elliott Bay and giant orange cranes plucking containers from freighters.
In the Pacific alone they built, in the midst of war, 111 major airstrips and 441 piers, tanks for the storage of 100m gallons of fuel, housing for 1.5m men and hospitals for 70,000 patients.
("Young ladies", carped Queen in 1900, "give themselves up to abandon on piers").
