Day: May 28, 2008

State Fish Pier, originally uploaded by captjoe06.

This Building on The State Fish Pier houses the herring plant and freezers for Cape Seafoods. This enormous building which you can barely see the end of in the picture because it is so big employs I think less than 20 full time employees. There have been incredible innovations in automation that move fish from boat to plant to freezer using very little labor.

Between Transvac herring pumps, herring conveyors and innovations in automation in the plant it all operates efficiently and flawlessly with a fraction of the dock workers that used to work on this site 20-30 years ago. The State Fish pier used to house many different seafood companies before the highly efficient Gloucester Seafood Display Auction and Cape Seafoods came to town.

When this new building was built it was shopped as a place to relocate fish businesses around the harbor to. Without financially viable alternative uses that would be allowed with the current zoning there was no incentive for waterfront business owners to relocate to this building and pay huge rent when their own property would be sold for pennies on the dollar because of the restrictive marine industrial zoning. Cape Seafoods stepped up and currently rents out the entire building.