Set among the port's acres of low-slung warehouses of ochre, magenta, salmon and rose corrugated metal, the institute served 15,500 seafarers and more than 40,000 truckers and other port workers last year.

ONE morning last week, my friend Sherri and I went shopping in one of those unfamiliar neighborhoods where low-slung anonymous warehouses have loading docks and blank windows.

He looked at the rubber-legged group that had walked off the ship that was now gathering out of sight behind a low-slung warehouse.

There are two visions for Long Island City, as starkly different from each other as the almost finished 50-story Citicorp building is from the low-slung warehouses, factories and brownstones it towers above.

From the street, New York Live, on the first floor of a low-slung warehouse, looks as much like a laundry or a car-rental office as a restaurant.

For the moment, the parking garage looks like a low-slung warehouse, elegantly white.

For decades low-slung warehouses, mostly manufacturers' distribution centers, have dominated the Meadlowlands, a 32-square-mile region that stretches through 14 communities in Bergen and Hudson Counties.

For much of the last decade, leftist mayors from Brazil's Workers Party have governed this industrial center, a drab cityscape of whitewashed high-rises and low-slung warehouses.

The site is hemmed in by auto repair outfits and low-slung warehouses.

The headquarters of Chip Davis's musical empire occupy three sprawling low-slung warehouses 10 miles north of downtown Omaha.