Rediscovering romance of NY ferries
Bridge and tunnel crowd seek open air, nice view
If a hot tub can be a time machine – and Hollywood assures us it can – what about a ferry?
Walt Whitman, for one, thought it could.
From the deck of a ferry crossing to Manhattan, 150 years ago, he addressed the readers of the future. “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,” he wrote.
“Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt.”
What Whitman couldn’t have known, when he wrote his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in 1856, is that the people of many generations hence would live in a bridge-and-tunnel world – one in which the experience of crossing to Manhattan on a ferry would be almost as unfamiliar, to the average citizen, as going to the ocean floor in a bathysphere.
And what those people, of the mid- to late 20th century, couldn’t have known is that the Manhattan ferry would make a spectacular comeback in the 21st. So Walt Whitman was right.
Commuters, over the past 20-plus years, have rediscovered the ferry.
“You can’t beat it,” said Jon Yasmer of Verona, who was making the crossing from Port Imperial, Weehawken, to West 39th Street in Manhattan on a recent Friday afternoon.
“It’s a beautiful view, you get a nice breeze, and it’s a way to relax on the water,” Yasmer said. “And you get a bit of a suntan.”
No traffic jams. No toll booths. Best of all, perhaps, the exhilarating sense – once familiar, then lost in the auto age – that Manhattan is an island, lapped by waves, roiled by currents, cooled by ocean breezes. The romance of the ferry is in the salt air, the spray, the incredible buildings seen from the water, as they loom closer. It is very much tied to the romance of New York.
“I love the view,” said Annie Lowrie of Connecticut, shipping out on the same boat. “It’s a different perspective of the city, seeing it from the water rather than the street.”
Cruising up and down city waterways, now, are dozens of ferries operated by several outfits.
The Manhattan, on which Yasmer and Lowrie were sailing, is one of many ferries that serve the “gold coast,” North
Jersey’s affluent waterfront communities, courtesy of NY Waterway.
Another company, Hornblower, operates the ferries of NYC Ferry, the city agency that since 2015 has been shuttling New Yorkers within city precincts – uptown to downtown, east side to west side, and over to the Statue of Liberty. A third, New York Water Taxi has a regular shuttle – suspended now, because of COVID-19 – that goes from Wall Street’s Pier 11 to Brooklyn’s IKEA store.
Then there’s Seastreak, which operates longer routes from Atlantic Highlands (closed, temporarily, because of the pandemic) and Highlands in Monmouth County.
“It really changes your life when you switch over to the ferry,” said Brett Chamberlain, director of marketing for Seastreak. “It’s by far the most civilized commute in the area. Just feeling the breeze in your hair really changes your perspective on life.”
So, about COVID-19. It has hit the
whole commuter industry hard.
Seastreak, Chamberlain said, is operating at 10% to 20% normal capacity these days. NY Waterway, reduced to a single route in March, reopened on limited basis on June 29. It’s operating at only about 7% capacity now, said Arthur Edward Imperatore Sr. of Fort Lee, founder and president of NY Waterway – the man who is credited, in the 1980s, with bringing New York’s ferry system back from the dead.
He was optimistic then. He’s optimistic now.
“We’re gonna come back bigger and stronger than ever,” said Imperatore, now 95. “We’re gonna win.”
Normally, NY Waterway averages 32,000 passengers a day, on 37 ferries it runs out of 10 New Jersey terminals. On this particular Friday midafternoon, there is only a smattering of passengers – which can’t be explained entirely by the off-peak hours. “Stay well – sit here,” read stickers on the benches, indicating how far apart the passengers should sit. They were hardly necessary.
Of course, in an age of masks and medical alerts, a small passenger list might be a selling point. So might an open-air top deck – as opposed to an enclosed, jammed subway or PATH car.
“Right now, it’s not crowded, and it’s always a beautiful ride, relaxing,” said Laura Hamilton of North Bergen. “A nice way to break up the commute.”
COVID-19 aside, ferries have become a growth industry. This summer, South Amboy in Middlesex County won a $5.3 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration for building a passenger ferry terminal. And ferries have been a hit with the public.
“The ridership of ferries has increased exponentially, year over year,” said Karen Imas, vice president of programs for Waterfront Alliance, a regional advocacy organization.
Back to the future! Retrograde progress – going backward to move forward – seems to be a hallmark of our age. We invent nuclear power plants, and then discover that, after all, old-fashioned windmills might be better. We develop the CD – and then decide we prefer vinyl.
“They’re coming back because of the ease of commute,” said Cortney Worrall, president and CEO of Waterfront Alliance. “And they provide a highly pleasurable means of travel.”
The tale of the rise, fall, and rise of the New York ferry is older than New York itself. The city was still “New Amsterdam” when the first ferry began plying between Manhattan island and what is now Brooklyn in 1642. By 1661, New Jersey got its first ferry: it shuttled between Communipaw (Jersey City) and Manhattan. The Staten Island Ferry launched in 1712. By 1904, there were 147 ferries were operating in and around New York.
Ferries shaped their age, in ways that were not always apparent at the time.
But from the moment the Hudson tubes began letting train traffic into Penn Station in 1910, followed by the Holland Tunnel opening to automobiles in 1927, the ferries were living on borrowed time. The George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel (1937) appeared to be the last nails in the coffin.
By the time the classic film “Citizen Kane” came out – 1941 – the New York ferry already seemed like a sad, ghostly emblem of the past. Along the river, old piers rotted, old ferries went to seed. One, the Mary Murray, lay derelict for years on the Raritan River near exit 9 of the New Jersey Turnpike – a wistful landmark. The Staten Island Ferry survived – the classic double-ended ferry, with dual wheelhouses, that could shuttle back and forth without having to turn around.
But the best argument for the ferries may still be Walt Whitman’s.
They connect us to the past, and the future. And they connect us to our surroundings – in a way that bridges and tunnels can’t. Ferries take us over water. But they also ground us.
“They remind us that we are a region of islands and shorelines,” Imas said. “They give us a different perspective on our geography and our communities, our open space and our outdoors. They are a way to reengage with the region. New York is a harbor city. New Jersey is a harbor state.”