Both the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal and the Manhattan Cruise Terminal will be undergoing major changes during the next few years. This post focuses on the work to be done at these sites and how it will affect cruisers who cruise in/out of the two cruise terminals within New York City proper.
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As many people already know, MSC will no longer have a home port in Brooklyn as of April 2026. The MSC Meraviglia will be moving to a new home port at the end of April, in part because of the work being done at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal affecting both Freight and Passenger traffic. New York City will perform a total overhaul of the marine terminal area, adding new housing stock in the area, reworking the streets for faster traffic flow, and shifting freight traffic onto the East River, treating the river as if it were a water highway,
Looking at the NYCEDC Vision Plan above, Brooklyn Marine Terminal development will be done in two areas:
- BMT North
- Atlantic Basin (site of the cruise terminal)
Area now used for cruise terminal parking would now be used for a hotel and for mixed use buildings. It will be even more expensive to park at the cruise terminal, making it much more expensive for people from outside NYC to drive to the terminal and go on a cruise.
The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal was built for Cunard's Queen Mary 2 to use when sailing into New York, as the piers at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal (at the time) could not handle ships of QM2's size. Although this restriction no longer applies, the MSC Meraviglia, Queen Mary 2, and various Princess ships made Brooklyn their home port for parts of the year. Unfortunately, MSC has not yet decided whether they will use New York as a home port after April 2026. This may leave room for another cruise line to use Brooklyn as a home port, as current 2026 schedules found online list only the Queen Mary 2 as making port stops in Brooklyn during the summer. Hopefully, a new cruise line will take advantage of these new open slots and make port here soon.
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Another major development going on will be the reconstruction of the Manhattan Cruise Terminal. Of the 5 piers originally available for cruise ships/ocean liners, piers 86 and 94 have been repurposed for other uses and are not available for future cruise ship use. Piers 90 & 92 cannot be used for safety reasons, leaving only pier 88 available for use.
Given the age and condition of the piers 88, 90, and 92, the NYC Economic Development Corporation has developed a blueprint for the rejuvenation of the Manhattan Cruise Terminal which will meet the port's 21st century needs.
Over the years, cruise ships/ocean liners have gotten longer and wider. Ships such as the Cunard Queen Mary 2 and the MSC Meraviglia could only dock at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, because the berths in Manhattan were too short to handle today's larger ships.
One of the most notable benefits of the rejuvenated Manhattan Cruise Terminal is that it will be able to provide berths for up to 3 ships at a time. At the upgraded terminal, there will be room for 2 ships which can carry 6,000-8,000 passengers and 1 ship which can carry 4,000-6,000 passengers. This is an important upgrade, as the largest cruise ships will soon be able to make port at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal. It is also an urgently needed upgrade, as there is no redundancy for pier 88 - it's also at risk for structural failure.
Although the future cruise terminal will have greater capacity than the current terminal, the transition period will limit the capacity of the terminal to 1 ship. A Northern berth has to be created first, so that the terminal can be used during the transition period. Once that is done, then work on the Southern berths can start. This will be a complicated effort, and cruise passengers will undergo some confusion during the terminal's redevelopment.
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Unfortunately, no date has been set for the start of work on rejuvenating the Manhattan Cruise Terminal. It is likely that work on the Brooklyn Marine Terminal will start first, while planning for work on the Manhattan terminal takes place. As work completes in Brooklyn, many contractors will shift their personnel to work on contracts they may have for Manhattan. (There are only a limited number of contracting companies who have the skills and resources to do this kind of work.)
Work in Brooklyn will likely start sometime in 2026, and work in Manhattan will start in 2028-2029 (assuming work in Brooklyn takes 2-3 years to complete). Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn sites, there should always be at least 2 berths available for cruise ships to make port in New York City. But some ships may need to make port at different terminals during renovations than they do today.
