Along old steel rails set in a Brooklyn cobblestone street, Sarah Jessica Parker performed an elegant balancing act in stilettos during a commercial for the final season of “Sex and the City.” Those rails, which run through the industrial district between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges formerly known as Vinegar Hill, now called DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), once belonged to the long-abandoned Jay Street Connecting Railroad.

The JSC emerged from the complex of piers, warehouses, and factories between Jay, Bridge, and Gold streets owned by Arbuckle Brothers, a firm that manufactured Ariosa and Yuban coffees (the name derived from “Yuletide Banquet”) and also owned the little railroad. It ran about a half-mile south along John, Adams, and Plymouth streets, with spurs running from its main line into factories and warehouses, to terminate just above the Brooklyn Bridge, in today’s Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park – which exists because the railroad used its location for team tracks: an open-air terminal where teamsters unloaded cargo directly from freight cars into wagons and trucks. The JSC had no direct rail connection: Instead, it used barges called car floats to interchange cars with other railroads.

By the 1830s, New York Harbor handled nearly half of America’s trade. Factories and warehouses, many with their own piers, soon lined the waterfronts of the five boroughs. Across the Hudson, numerous railroads – Pennsylvania, Erie, Lackawanna, Reading, Lehigh Valley, Jersey Central – reached Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. But the river’s width and the region’s numerous waterways made constructing railroads into New York prohibitively expensive. Long Island, for example, was not directly linked to the nation al railway network until 1910, when the Pennsylvania Railroad tunneled beneath the Hudson and East rivers. Hence, railroads began floating freight cars between Jersey waterfront freight yards and waterside freight terminals in the five boroughs, such as the gigantic Bush Terminal in Brooklyn, which served 15 industrial lofts (each six to eight stories high), eight steamship piers, and over 100 warehouses. By World War II, New York’s railroads daily floated over 5,300 freight cars.

Thus, several times daily, a barnred JSC tugboat, its stack painted in Arbuckle Brothers’ trademark orange and black, shoved a float loaded with freight cars to the railroad’s Jay Street float bridge: a wooden truss hanging over the water with one end hinged from a pier.Once the float was pinned to the bridge – secured with toggle bars and cables – a JSC locomotive pulled the cars from the float one at a time to prevent capsizing and then replaced them with Jerseybound cars from the JSC’s yard.Then the tugboat hauled the float away.

Arbuckle Brothers was one of America’s largest importers of coffee and sugar,with freighters jamming its piers north of the Manhattan Bridge to unload Colombian beans for roasting. Cowboys had a famous passion for Arbuckle’s Ariosa,”the coffee that won the West.” The firm had grown from a single grocery to an empire through the genius of a founder, John Arbuckle. After devising a sugarbased glaze to keep roasted coffee beans fresh, he invented a machine that sorted roasted beans by grade and then poured each grade into an appropriate paper package, which it weighed, sealed, and labeled. Each machine replaced 500 people who had done the same work by hand.

In 1904, Arbuckle started the JSC to more efficiently shift cargoes among his buildings. On realizing neighboring businesses would pay for railroad service, he extended the line. Soon, trains of two or three cars were constantly puffing through Vinegar Hill bound for delivery to factories and warehouses along the right of way.Goods for delivery to other parts of Brooklyn were unloaded down at the team tracks. By the 1930s, the JSC had replaced its steam engines with cheap, second-hand gasoline and diesel-electric locomotives painted orange and black. Each was unique: oldest and oddest was Number 3, America’s second-oldest gasoline-powered freight locomotive, which was essentially a shack housing a 175 hp engine on a flatcar.

The JSC prospered until after World War II, even after Arbuckle’s sold their properties. Then the interstate highway system made motor trucking competitive with railroads. Waterfront factories relocated from the city. Oil and gas home heating eliminated bulk coal shipments, the largest category of harbor railroad freight. Finally, rising wages made building, maintaining, and operating carfloats uneconomic.

On June 27, 1959, the JSC became the first harbor terminal railroad to be abandoned. Nearly all the others followed. The survivor, New York Regional Rail, runs carfloats between Greenville, N.J., and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal.

On land, the NYRR interchanges with the South Brooklyn Railway, another short line, which once, legend says, attempted to haul a dead whale by flatcar to the Coney Island Aquarium.The whale proved too big for the tunnel south of Fourth Avenue, but that is another story.