Today's lead story got people talking, so let's go deeper. Twenty-four years — that's how long it took to get the Hugh K. Leatherman Terminal from an idea to an open gate. For context, that's longer than most Charlestonians have lived in this city.
Two Decades in the Making
The story starts in 1997, when the State Ports Authority bought land on Daniel Island for a new terminal, branded "Global Gateway," with a 2012 opening date. Ambitious. Also dead within five years — local opposition killed it in 2002, and the SPA went looking for a new site.
They found one on the south end of the old Navy base in North Charleston. Permits filed in 2003. Approved in 2007. Then the real grind started: demolition, more than 6,300 miles of wick drains to dry out the site, six million yards of sand and rock barged in just to make the ground buildable. Vertical construction didn't even start until 2018. The terminal finally opened in March 2021.
Why Build It At All
Simple math. The Panama Canal got widened, bigger ships started calling on the East Coast, and Charleston needed the capacity to compete for that business or watch it go somewhere else. Leatherman was designed to roughly double the port's container capacity. Pair that with a $558 million harbor-deepening project that got Charleston to 52 feet — the deepest channel on the East Coast — and the whole play was about staying in the conversation for the biggest ships afloat.
Money-wise, this wasn't cheap. Phase One alone ran close to $986 million, financed mostly through revenue bonds. Add rail yard and barge infrastructure and you get to that $1.2 billion figure everyone quotes. Full buildout — three berths, 2.4 million TEUs of capacity — is still years away, penciled in for the 2030s.
A Victory Lap That Never Happened
Leatherman opened in March 2021 as the first new U.S. container terminal since 2009. On budget. Ahead of schedule. Should've been a victory lap.
Instead, the International Longshoremen's Association filed a labor complaint days before opening, then sued the shipping lines for $300 million once ships actually started calling at the new terminal. Shipping companies did the math and just... stopped showing up. Ships that would've called at Leatherman got rerouted to Wando Welch instead. Some went to Savannah.
That dispute dragged on until 2024, when the SPA and the ILA finally struck a deal letting union members and state workers share crane operations. By then, the terminal that was supposed to be Charleston's next big competitive weapon had spent three years as a near-ghost facility.
The East Coast Arms Race
Savannah is the rival Charlestonians talk about most, and for good reason — it's the closest, most direct competitor for the same Southeast import business. But it's one name in a bigger field. Norfolk and the Port of Virginia, and the massive New York-New Jersey complex, were all part of the same East Coast calculation once the Panama Canal widened and every port on the coast started chasing bigger ships.
Savannah just happens to be the one pulling ahead fastest. They're mid-renovation on their own $1.6 billion overhaul of the Ocean Terminal, pushing capacity from 200,000 TEUs toward 1.75 million. They just notified the Army Corps of Engineers about plans to deepen the Savannah River again — four years after the last time they deepened it. And the numbers back it up: Savannah moved 5.8 million TEUs last year against Charleston's 2.8 million. That's roughly double. Virginia, meanwhile, saw an 8% drop in container traffic last year, so it's not a straight line for anyone in this race.
Good Concrete, Bad Timing
Charleston isn't losing this fight because of bad planning. The terminal itself is genuinely state of the art: five ship-to-shore cranes standing 169 feet tall, a refrigerated cargo yard, room for the biggest ships on the East Coast. The problem was everything around the concrete. Labor disputes, litigation, higher operating costs from an all-union workforce post-2024 — all of it added up to a terminal that, even before this summer's shutdown, handled less than 5% of the port's core cargo business.
So here we are. Twenty-four years of planning and building, $1.2 billion spent, and in June the SPA announced it's temporarily idling the whole thing starting August 1 — citing a soft global shipping market and the need to control costs. Not a failure of engineering. A failure of everything that happened after the ribbon got cut.
Charleston built a terminal meant to keep pace with every major port on the East Coast. The timing never cooperated.
