Port of New York and New Jersey

The Port of New York and New Jersey is the largest seaport on the East Coast and one of the largest in the nation, spread across the sheltered waters of New York Harbor at the mouth of the Hudson River. It was this deep, protected, ice-free harbor - and the Erie Canal that linked it to the interior in 1825 - that propelled New York past its rivals to become the country's greatest commercial city and its main gateway for immigration through Ellis Island.

Today most container traffic has shifted from Manhattan's old finger piers to vast automated terminals on the New Jersey side, around Newark and Elizabeth. To let the largest modern ships reach those docks, engineers famously raised the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge. The harbor still handles millions of containers a year while also carrying the ferries, tugs, and harbor traffic that move around the Statue of Liberty in the nation's busiest urban waterway.

• New York City
  The largest city in the United States related