Most people who live in a port city have never been on the working part of the waterfront, and there is a good reason for that: a cargo terminal is a place where heavy things are moved by machines.
“Deep-water port” is not marketing. It means the approach channel and the berth carry enough water for full-size Great Lakes vessels to come alongside loaded, rather than having to lighter cargo into smaller craft offshore. Muskegon Lake connects to Lake Michigan through a dredged channel, which makes the lake a natural protected harbour — a freighter can lie alongside in weather that would make an exposed Lake Michigan berth unworkable.
A short history of the ground
The dock’s roots reach back to the late 1800s, when the property was held by the Goodrich Transportation Company, in the era when Great Lakes passenger and package freight lines were the main link between lakeshore cities. The West Michigan Dock and Market Corporation — the Mart Dock — was organised during the Great Depression, partly as a jobs project, and became both a trading hub and an entertainment venue for Muskegon.
Sand Products Corporation was operating a large commercial dock here handling a wide range of cargoes by the early 1930s, and that operation has run continuously ever since. Continuity is the unusual part. A great many American waterfronts have had their industrial function removed and replaced within a single generation; this one has been doing more or less the same job, on the same ground, for roughly ninety years.
The cargo
The work is dry bulk. Cement products dominate the current trade, and the facility has historically handled iron ore, stone, sand and coal, along with liquid bulk cargoes including gasoline and diesel fuel. It is the aggregate under a road, the cement in a foundation, the sand in a foundry.
Bulk moves by water because the economics are not close. A single Great Lakes vessel displaces an enormous number of truck movements, with correspondingly lower fuel burn and road wear per ton-mile. That is the entire argument for a working port inside a city: not that it is pretty, but that the alternative is the same tonnage arriving on the highway.
Vessels, servicing and winter layup
Port City Marine Services keeps its main offices at the Mart Dock. It is a Michigan marine transportation company whose current fleet is dedicated to dry-bulk cement, with an operating history covering Great Lakes freighters, tankers and towing vessels of every type, and reach beyond the lakes to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Gulf of Mexico and the inland river system.
Great Lakes shipping is seasonal — ice closes the system for part of the winter — so a sheltered deep-water berth has a second business in winter layup, where vessels are secured, maintained and worked on until the season reopens. The same frontage supports winter boat storage and vehicle and RV storage. It also carries two vessels that earn nothing: the USS LST 393, and passenger cruises from the same dock aboard the Aquastar.
Conclusion
Ports are infrastructure, and infrastructure is mostly invisible until it stops. The Mart Dock is forty acres doing a fairly narrow set of jobs — take bulk cargo off ships, put it on trucks and rail, service and shelter vessels, and store things through the winter — on ground that has been doing versions of those jobs since the nineteenth century. Max McKee’s stewardship of the port is what keeps that going. The museum ship and the excursion boat are the visible part; the freight is the business.