1. Cheap docks kept wharfage rates down, enhancing the port’s competitiveness. They wore out quickly, however, and their narrow little basins, clogged with filth, became breeding grounds for disease. They were thus a far cry from the great enclosed stone piers of London—the West India Docks (1800-1806), London Docks (1800—5), East India Docks (1803-6), and the sumptuous new St. Katharine’s Dock (1823) beside the Tower of London, which allowed direct unloading from ship to warehouse—all of which were linked directly with England’s inland waterways via. the new Regent’s Canal (1812-20). But such enterprises were fantastically expensive—the London Dock Company alone spent 1.2 million pounds—and technically unnecessary in New York. The tides of the Thames (and Liverpool’s Mersey) rose and fell twenty feet. The vast dock enclosures were designed to accept vessels at high water and then, by closing their locks, keep them afloat when the tide receded. New York’s rivers and estuaries fluctuated only four or five feet. This allowed the city to make do with less costly, less sightly, and less healthy versions.