NEW YORK FERRY BOATS

During more than two and a half centuries New York was pre-eminently the City of Ferries. Never was a cily more dependent ^on them. Decade alter decade, generation alter generation, they lurched and lumbered and tooted raucously along ihe scores of miles of New York’s water front, seemingly permanent parts of the metropolitan scene. Observing them, one fascinated out-of-lowncr exclaimed: “They’re like big houses detaching themselves from one side of the harbor, drifting across il, and attaching themselves to the other side.” In the two world wars, Europe-bound American soldiers from inland parts of the United States who had never seen die sea mistook the ferries for the transports that were to carry them across the ocean.

As early as 1846 there were eleven regular ferry lines serving Manhattan, Long Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey. There were fifteen lines in 1850: and. by 1910, (he map of lower Manhattan, from Central Park down, showed thirty-five different routes, each employing a small or large flotilla of boats, constantly progressing in size and comfort and up-to-the-minute appointments. They ran at intervals of from five to sixty minutes. Various railroads terminating in Jersey City or Hoboken or on Long Island soon started operating ferries in connection with their trains—and two of ihein are still reluctantly doing it. Some of the ferry companies maintained a twenty-four-hour schedule. It was, be it remembered, a blissful age when any point on the East Coast could be reached by steamship and when ten lines were engaged in serving the upper Hudson River alone.

In addition Io all this there were, and still are, ferries, run by municipal and federal agencies, between Manhattan and the various small islands roundabout. At the apex of New York City’s ferry age the scores of ferryboats engaged in these multiple services gave a color and originality to its harbor that made it unique among the great ports ol the world.

First among New York’s ferries was the one established in 1638 or thereabouts between Peck Slip in Manhattan, and Brooklyn, then one of the fast-growing Dutch settlements on Long Island. The impresario of this service, a Dutchman, Cornclis Dircksen, used to work on his little farm nearby until somebody seized with a craving to go to Brooklyn blew a horn hanging from a tree at Peck Slip, whereupon Cornells exchanged farming for ferrying. (At the Brooklyn end another horn hanging from another tree mobilized another ferryman.) At first Cornclis and his successors employed rowboats and canoes; later, larger craft with sails replaced them.

The steady growth of New Amsterdam and neighboring settlements on Long Island and Staten Island and in New Jersey was bringing proportionate development to the transportation business. In 1661, a ferry was started between the Battery and Bergen on the Jersey shore; and another, in ifiliy, across the Harlem River. The latter waterway soon had a bridge across it, ihiis ending Manhattan’s complete isolation by water fi-oin the rest of the world. But all the other sides of the island iemaincd ideal for profitable ferrying ventures.

Soon the city authorities got busy drafting rules and regulations. Ferrymen were forbidden to operate without a license. They were required to provide proper “servants”—i.e., crews and other employees—to “pass all officials free,’ and to refrain from navigating in stormy weather. The charge lor the ferriage of a two-horse wagon was twenty stivers, or one dollar; lor a one-horse wagon, sixty cents. The regular fare for each passenger was fifteen cents: but, for some mysterious reason, Indians were charged thirty cents. Ferry operators were obligated (o shelter patrons in houses at each terminus of their lines—a wise regulation, since interruptions of service before the days of steam sometimes lasted twenty-four hours or more.

Ferrying by sail laid the foundations of a fortune lor Cornelius Vanderbiit, who won his t it Ie of Commodore from it, and it promised another to Robert Fulton, who obtained permission in iHii to run two vessels built by him, equipped with steam-driven machinery of his own invention, as ferries between the Battery and the Jersey shore. A year later, he and his wealthy partner, Robert Livingston, were authorized to operate another line across the East River to Long island.

Fulton’s steam ferryboats were of the catamaran type, with (wo hulls, united by a primitive bridge, or deck. They had a steering wheel between the hulls and a rudder at each end. The machinery lie devised for them was placed on the deck amidships. Doth ends of the boats were alike, making it possible for them to function without turning around. All that was needed to move them in the opposite direction was to reverse the machinery. This has remained a feature of Xew York’s ferryboats to the present day, although sidewheelers gave way after a time to propeller-driven craft.

Weather permitting, Fulton’s boats could cross from the Battery to Jersey in fourteen minutes—their average time was uventv minutes—a great improvement on the forty-five minutes’ average required by sailboat ferries.

Seventy-six years ago the fateful handwriting on the wall for New York’s ferryboat era became clearly visible to all whose minds could interpret correctly what their eyes saw. In 1883 the Brooklyn (or, more properly, East River) Bridge was opened to traffic. Soon, in I he wake of the Kasi River Bridge, came the Manhattan and the Williamsburg and the Oueensborough and the Hell Gate bridges, and, on the Hudson,∗ the George Washington Bridge. Finally, the huge Triborough Bridge linked Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan. Subway tunnels were dug. one close after the other, through which trains roared to Long Island and New Jersey, and vehicular tunnels further robbed local Terries of the lucrative carrying of passengers and vehicles. The Pennsylvania Railroad drove its great tubes under the Hudson River and beyond it under the East River, linking New Jersey, Manhattan, and Long Island on a through route. Trains from the South and West could pass without interruption into New York and thence (via Long Island and its great Hell Gate Bridge to the mainland) into New England. This superseded the huge train-ferry boat Maryland, which had long transported passengers from Boston and the rest of New England across New York Harbor to trains for Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington.

∗ To the confusion of visitors. New Yorkers sometimes call the Hudson the North River, although it lies to the west. The walcrwav at the north, the Harlem River, is really a strait, and so is the East River, in reality the western outlet of Long Island Sound. We could go on to point out ilia! the Upper Bay is below Manhattan, that Jackson Heights are quite low, and that Turtle Bay is dry land—but this perhaps will suffice. [Ed.]

How they used to line her decks as she steamed along the East River in daylight; how they gaped at the wonderful panorama of color and movement and beauty and power spread before them; anil, at night, with what awe they contemplated an equally breath-taking panorama of thousands of twinkling lights and ghostly forms of ships and silent multitudes of closely packed buildings—a Manhattan unbelievably asleep—as the Maryland rounded the Battery and pointed her nose across the Hudson!

Today New York’s ferryboats are vanishing; where yesterday there were ten, there is now only one. Many of their slips, with salt-encrusted, yielding wooden walls, have vanished completely. Others, unpainted and untended, are rotting away. Only the Manhattan-Staten Island line still functions on the old heroic scale, and bridges already join Staten Island to New Jersey. Soon there will be another bridge from Staten Island to Long Island to cut the traffic further and perhaps end the existing ferry from Staten Island to Brooklyn.

No boat at all crosses the East River today. Gone are the once-busy South Street Ferry and Hamilton Ferry, which used to cross the eastern part of New York Harbor, where it is joined by the East River, to transport passengers to various parts of Brooklyn. Gone is the Wall Street Ferry. And gone, likewise, is that teeming focus of metropolitan traffic of other days, the Fulton Ferry. Long after the shadow of the East River Bridge first fell across its boats, they continued to ply undaunted—but, as the years passed, that shadow became ever more symbolic of what was certain to happen to them on some forthcoming and less enlightened day.

The crowning irony for the two (until spring, 1959, it was three) remaining Hudson River ferry lines is that they offer, quite unsuspected by millions of New York drivers, a sometimes faster and cheaper rush-hour service than the highways. While traffic inches through the teeming tunnels, often taking a half-hour or more, fast ferry service operates at frequent intervals, half-empty, in the breezes up above. The very existence of these ferries, except to regular railway commuters, is barely known. There are no highway signs leading to them; the terminals are hidden in dingy corners, their existence kept dark; there is no word on the radio that tries to guide harried drivers; even the police are vague about them. All of this probably suits the railway owners, the Lackawanna and the Jersey Central, who would like to be out of a business made unprofitable by government. Cities are planned for the motorcar nowadays, not for ferries, nor for the fresh-air lover, nor even for the pedestrian.

Now that the shape of things to come has, to such a horrifying extent, arrived, the ferry has no more future in the city than comfort itself. It is only an amenity, something unknown to modern-day city planners, a whiff of the sea, a breath of cool air and a suggestion of romance at the beginning and end of the day. After the last ferry is scrapped, however, some city department may think to build a replica, of modern design of course, in Central Park for the children. It will have an imitation whistle, and Muzak.