Founded critical ferry service in New York City
Arthur E. Imperatore Sr., a bluff entrepreneur who parlayed a trucking fortune into a dubious ferryboat operation that grew to be a critical link in New York City’s transit network, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 95.
His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was confirmed by his stepson, Armand Pohan, who said Imperatore had suffered from progressive kidney failure.
Imperatore steered the ferry service, New York Waterway, through legal and financial straits and disputes with government officials. But he also reveled in moments of glory, when his boats rode to the rescue on Sept. 11, 2001, and eight years later, when a commercial jet splashed down in the Hudson River.
Imperatore, whose formal education ended at high school, did not set out to be a ferry tycoon. He started the service as a “loss leader” to promote the 2 miles of industrial waterfront property he had acquired on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, Pohan said.
The land, most of which lay in the town of Weehawken, had belonged to the Penn Central railroad. Imperatore bought it for $7.75 million in 1981 with the dream of turning it into a minicity in “the Greco
Roman tradition” called Port Imperial.
Few people thought Imperatore would be a winner in the ferry business. Some derided the venture as “Arthur’s folly.”
But he plowed ahead, docking a hulking old ferry at the river’s edge as a makeshift terminal. There, passengers would board smaller boats for the quick crossing to a pier he had bought in midtown Manhattan.