NEW YORK ? For nearly a century, great ocean liners ended their trans-Atlantic crossings with a grand finale ? a nautical promenade past the Statue of Liberty and skyscrapers of Manhattan.

That changed on Saturday, when the world?s biggest passenger ship edged into a remote Brooklyn pier once known for coffee, corruption and crime.

What happened when the nearly 2,200 passengers stepped off the 1,132-foot was also different. Instead of being in midtown Manhattan, where hotels are a quick cab ride away, they were in Red Hook, facing a convoluted trip through the traffic-clogged streets of Brooklyn.

The arrival of the , on the first of 11 scheduled visits to New York this year, marked the formal opening of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. Other visiting cruise ships over the next few months will include the.

The terminal came into being after several cruise lines transferred from the outmoded cruise terminal on the Hudson River on Manhattan?s Upper West Side to Bayonne, New Jersey. That was a blow to the city?s $600 million cruise business.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg?s answer was a $150 million plan to upgrade the West Side terminal and open a new one on Brooklyn?s vacant Pier 12, where coffee-importing ships once tied up.

In 2004, Carnival and Norwegian Cruise Lines signed agreements guaranteeing at least 13 million visitors and $200 million in port charges to the city through 2017. But only Cunard and Princess, both owned by Carnival, plan to make Red Hook their New York home port.

Brooklyn officials expect the facility to produce about 300 jobs ? though nearly all of them part-time ? and inject new vitality into Red Hook, a long-neglected slice of Brooklyn where the docks were plagued by the kind of corruption depicted in the Oscar-winning 1954 film ?On the Waterfront.?

While developers have recently discovered Red Hook, it remains a neighbourhood with few amenities for tourists, a picturesque melange of brick streets, 19th-century warehouses, flower pots on stoops and attack-trained Dobermans and a Rottweiler named ?Pretty Boy? snarling behind chain-link fences.

Even Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president, conceded passengers will not spend much time or money in Red Hook as long as it remains only a place for arrivals and departures.

?My real objective, I want Brooklyn to be a port of call,? Markowitz said. ?Ships leaving Canada on their way to Florida, I want them to stop in Brooklyn. That?s the real honey. Right now we?ve got the milk, but I want the honey.?

The steel-shed terminal has been gussied up, with paint, landscaping and a Dodger-blue ?Welcome to Brooklyn? logo. Dredging, dock improvements and other upgrades requested by Cunard for its flagship, the , nearly doubled the original $30 million cost.

Red Hook residents have mixed views about cruise ships docking at their front door.

?It?s going to be good,? said transit worker Richard Meyer, 52, a Red Hook native. ?When I retire I can just wheel my luggage down to the dock and go for a cruise.?

Others complain that the terminal is not creating jobs for Red Hook itself. ?Everybody over there seems to be from somewhere else,? said Jean Francois, a laid-off truck driver who lives nearby.

Residents of adjacent neighboruhoods, meanwhile, fear a flood of trucks, cars, taxis and buses as a small army of drivers, cleaners and provisioners swarms over each arriving ship as passengers disembark and new ones come aboard.

?It?ll be a traffic nightmare ? everything from heavy trucks to gypsy cabs,? predicted Vincent Favorito, a lawyer in nearby Carroll Gardens, who sits on a local waterfront economic development committee. ?I haven?t seen anything resembling a plan to move people on and off the ships and get to the tunnel to Manhattan.?

Markowitz shrugged off such concerns, saying ships arriving on weekends during the April-October cruise season should have minimal effect.