A ‘Blue Highway’ Is Cruising to Hunts Point

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By Jonathan Custodio, THE CITY.

A new marine freight barge at the country’s largest wholesale fish market could reduce congestion and air pollution.

The Economic Development Corporation and Con Agg Global, a Bronx-based urban logistics and construction company, announced on Tuesday the impending arrival of a so-called blue highway at the Fulton Fish Market in Hunts Point. A new barge on the East River, directly outside the market, will let food and other supplies reach their final destinations by boat, instead of truck.

The two-phase plan for a new “blue highway,” utilizing the city’s waterways rather than its roads, will mean at least 1,000 fewer trucks a month on the road, according to the EDC.

A barge, mostly handling construction materials, will be placed in the water at the southern tip of the Fish Market in the coming weeks. That will be followed later this year by a second barge for food and beverages — provided that the City Council approves an underwater lease allowing for its permanent operation. The land underwater is owned by the city.

Workers will use e-cargo bikes to transfer products to and from the barges.

Con Agg Global CEO Paul Granito told THE CITY the permanent facility will be a more robust version of the initial setup, which he described as a floating crane.

“It just floats in. It does its job, and then it leaves. And when we’re out operating in a more robust manner, there’ll be a physical structure in the water that doesn’t leave,” he said.

Andrew Kimball, CEO of the Economic Development Corporation, said at the press conference that once the Council approves the underwater lease, “the plan is that there will be one barge focused entirely on food, one separately on construction materials like aggregate. And we expect that approval to get through the Council no later than six months from now.”

That plan is part of a larger push to make more use of the city’s waterways centered around the Brooklyn Marine Terminal.

Hunts Point, also home to the city’s biggest produce market, is a delivery hub for food, products and construction materials that attracts thousands of truck drivers a day making “last-mile” deliveries of products consumers need quickly.

At the Fulton Fish Market Cooperative, which handles about 45% of the city’s seafood and is the largest in the country, the current process involves truck drivers “delivering products between about 10 p.m. and midnight,” its CEO Nicole Ackerina told THE CITY, noting that about 500 of the market’s 1,200 employees are Bronx residents.

“All the product gets loaded at our loading docks here, and then it gets distributed to folks throughout the market, and then it gets sold. And then trucks take it out.”

Those deliveries from diesel-burning trucks have contributed to the high asthma rates in the South Bronx. 

“For years, we’ve whispered about blue highways. We’ve talked about ‘here are all these businesses have to be on the water, yet we don’t use the water.’ We have all these truck trips coming in and out every day, the pollutants and all of those things,” recalled Maria Torres, president of the youth and community development organization The Point.

The long process of getting community board members and other neighbors on board with the project “was gratifying, and it was good,” said Torres. “I was glad that we had positive outcomes. We’re able to see this come through.”

Jonathan is THE CITY’s Bronx reporter, where he covers the latest news out of the city’s northernmost borough. This piece originally appeared in The CITY on April 23, 2025.