We were thrilled to join the rest of the city in gaping in awe at yesterday’s arrival of the Queen Mary 2 — which, at 21 stories tall, four football fields long, and big enough to carry more than 2,000 passengers, is the world’s largest passenger vessel. We couldn’t help, though, but take note of the fact that no pier in Manhattan is large enough to accommodate properly the mighty vessel, which, tied up at Pier 92, protrudes 130 feet into the Hudson.

No doubt this is why there’s such a battle going on over the prospect of a pier in Buttermilk Channel. We first got an earful of this from the president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, Kenneth Adams, who reckons the the city should invest in making Kings County a center for the local cruise ship industry. As a February story by our Dav’d Andreatta reported, the Bloomberg administration recently walked away from a $110 million proposal from the Carnival Corporation to develop two Brooklyn piers as satellite passenger terminals. Carnival offered to split the expense with the city, with the city paying $25 million of the total cost, but the Bloomberg administration said the deal lacked important long-term guarantees from Carnival.

The city’s counter-proposal — a $250 million deal over a 10-year period, involv ing upgrades to one pier in Manhattan and two in Brooklyn — has met with a skeptical response from the cruise-ship industry, which has expressed doubts about the city’s ability to finance and complete big projects. This comes on top of another setback, the recent decision by Royal Caribbean Lines to abandon Manhattan’s undersized piers for New Jersey.

Voices of criticism have been sounded from within city government. Council Member Oliver Koppell of the Bronx claims the Bloomberg administration’s economic development team has been too preoccupied with preparing New York’s Olympic bid to put resources into the cruise-ship business, a situation that Mr. Koppell terms “a scandal.” While we’re not prepared to go that far, we note that the cruise ship business, which brings an estimated $600 million a year to the city, is expected to double in size in the coming decade.

Mr. Bloomberg can take special note of the Brooklyn business community’s welcoming attitude, expressed in the new tourism center at Brooklyn Borough Hall. With the proper amount of energy and imagination, City Hall might just discover that the friendly waters of Brooklyn’s Buttermilk Channel might prove to be the best home for the new queen of the sea when she arrives on a return visit.