NY Harbor History:A Glance Back in Time

By Richard B. Marrin

The Governors of New York and New Jersey recently announced the first phase of a plan to expand ferry service between the two states, especially to the southern tip of Manhattan. The hope is to add an additional 63,000 passengers a day to the present ferry commuting population of 60,000.
This is the latest chapter in the remarkable history of ferries in New York Harbor, a past not only sprinkled with several significant “firsts”, but which also witnessed some major changes in how Americans live today

In the Beginning

Arguably, New York introduced ferries to the New World. In 1638, a Manhattan bound traveler from Brooklyn would blow a horn, conveniently left hanging on a tree, to summon farmer Cornelius Dircksen for a hand-rowed trip across the East River. The fare was paid in wampum, a common form of currency in Dutch New Amsterdam. Ferry service, on the western side of Manhattan, across the Hudson to Jersey City, was begun in 1661 by another Dutchman, William Jansen. If the traveler were in a hurry, Jansen carried extra oars so he could row too, but with no discount in price.
During the 1700’s, water traffic in the harbor was powered by the muscle of oarsmen or, in the case of “horse ferries”, by a team of eight draft animals which drove a central water wheel. Small sloops and the distinctively designed periaugers were pushed around the harbor by wind, when there was any.
Ferry service took a giant step forward in 1807, when Robert Fulton, a New York ferryboat owner, invented the steamboat. A paddle wheel, turned by steam power generated by boilers, revolutionized water travel. In 1811, he began a ferry service from the Battery at Manhattan’s southern tip to Hoboken New Jersey, introducing double-ended catamarans with center paddle wheels. The double ends eliminated having to turn the vessel around and made it easier to load horse drawn carriages

The Birth of Suburbia and the Commuter

The steamboat arrived in the nick of time. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connected New York harbor via the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and the mid-west. It enabled New York City to become the commercial capital of the United States, which in turn attracted the bulk of the European trade. The thriving City’s population exploded.
Manhattan could not accommodate the increasing numbers. Brooklyn and a few New Jersey towns became the first suburbs in the United States, according to Gotham, A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace.
By the mid 1850’s, some 60,000 Native born New Yorkers had relocated to Brooklyn and New Jersey . Often, it was a development planned by the ferry owners themselves. For example, the Pierrepont family in Brooklyn having an interest in Fulton’s Steam Ferry Boat Company, closed its gin distillery, store houses and wharves which occupy what is now Brooklyn Heights, and in 1814 subdivided the property into large lots. These Pierrepont sold to “Gentlemen, whose business or profession require daily attendance in the City”. It was a four to eight minute ferry ride on any of the forty trips at day. On the other side of Manhattan, Colonel John Stevens, did the same with the then island of Hoboken. Filling in the marshes, he subdivided land into lots and sold them to New Yorkers, who could commute on his ferry.
In these passengers, we can find the precursors of today’s commuter — you and I — traveling a considerable distance on a daily basis between their homes and workplaces. Indeed, Edward K. Spann, in The New Metropolis –New York City 1840-1857, referred to the ferry lines to Jersey City, Hoboken, Williamsburg and Brooklyn as the earliest forms of mass transportation.

The Best of Times

The number of ferry riders soared. By the 1850’s, ferries left New York for Jersey City every 10 to 15 minutes, the fare being 3 cents for the mile trip across the Hudson. In 1855, an estimated 7 million people a year used the Jersey City ferries. They did not all come from Jersey City which at that time had a population of fewer than 10,000.
The New Jersey Railroad brought passengers from Philadelphia and elsewhere to its Jersey City terminal. Soon, 850-ton ferries, carrying 2,000 passengers each, as well as horses, wagons and carriages, crossed the Hudson every 10 minutes, 15 minutes at night.
The traffic across the East River was even greater and more frequent. A fleet of six ferries combined for 1,250 ferry crossings a day from Williamsburg to Peck Slip every 10 minutes and every five minutes to Grand Street.
In 1854, a dozen of the best lines that crossed the East River were consolidated into the Union Ferry Company. There was a ferry every ten minutes from Peck Slip to Williamsburg. At first, the one-way was a penny, then raised to 2 cents, wampum not accepted. In the year 1860, the East River ferries carried nearly 33 million passengers. That would increase to 50 million a year by 1870. Especially remarkable was Brooklyn, in 1860, had a population of fewer than 300,000, a third of whom it was estimated commuted to New York City each day.

The Worst of Times

According to The Encyclopedia of New York City, “folk wisdom held that when there was fog in the harbor, half the business population of New York City would be late for work”. By 1883, the weather excuse became less acceptable with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. It disappeared entirely in 1904, when the subway went into service, crossing under the East River connecting downtown New York and downtown Brooklyn. In 1925, the last commercial line across the East river shut down.
However, ferry services held their own during the depression of the 1930s. South Ferry and other downtown locations still connected the City with Jersey City, Weehawkin, Hoboken and other locations with fares remaining reasonable, on average only 4 cents per trip. But it was only a temporary respite. Car and rail tunnels and bridges from Jersey and Long Island further depleted the ferry population.
The opening of the Verrazano Bridge in 1964, for example, eliminated the ferry between Bay Ridge Brooklyn and Staten Island. The last survivor, other than the municipally operated Staten Island Ferry, was the Lackawanna Railroad Ferry, from Hoboken to several points in Manhattan. It gave up the ghost in 1967.

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