If a hot tub can be a time device, and Hollywood promises, what about a ferry?
Walt Whitman, for his part, the idea is possible.
From a ferry bridge across manhattan 150 years ago, he addressed readers of the future: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or so many generations here,” he wrote.
“Just as you feel when you look at the river and the sky, I felt it.”
What Whitman could not know, when he wrote his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in 1856, that other people of many generations would live in a world of bridges and tunnels, a world in which to revel in crossing.getting to Manhattan by ferry would be almost as unknown to the average citizen as going to the back of the ocean in a bathysphere.
And what these people, from the mid to the last 20th century, could not know that the Manhattan ferry would make a dramatic return to the 21st century, when, in the end, Walt Whitman was right.
Travellers have rediscovered the ferry for the past 20 years.
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“You can’t beat him,” said Jon Yasmer of Verona, who crossed from Port Imperial, Weehawken, to West 39th Street, Manhattan, on a recent Friday afternoon.
“It’s a beautiful view, you have a great breeze and it’s a way to get into the water,” Yasmer said, “and you tan a little.”
No traffic jams. No tolls. Best of all, perhaps, is the exhilarating feeling, once familiar, then lost in the car era, that Manhattan is an island, bathed in waves, stirred by currents, cooled by the ocean breeze.The romance of the ferry is in the salty air, the aerosols, the buildings noticed from the water as they approached.It’s very similar to the New York romance.
“I love the view,” said Annie Lowrie of Connecticut, getting on the same boat.”It’s another attitude of the city, to see it from the water than from the street.”
Currently, dozens of ferries operate on the city’s waterways and operate through several companies.
The Manhattan, where Yasmer and Lowrie sailed, is one of many ferries serving the Gold Coast, North Jersey’s thriving coastal communities, courtesy of NY Waterway.
Another company, Hornblower, operates the ferries of NYC Ferry, the city’s company that, since 2015, has been traveling with New Yorkers in the city’s neighborhoods: downtown, east to west, and the Statue of Liberty., has a normal round-trip bus, now suspended due to COVID, ranging from Wall Street Pier 11 to THE IKEA store in Brooklyn.
Then there’s Seastreak, which operates longer routes from the Atlantic Highlands (temporarily closed due to the pandemic) and the Highlands in Monmouth County.
“Change your life when you spend on the ferry,” said Brett Chamberlain, Seastreak’s chief marketing officer.”This is by far the highest civilized direction in the region.Just feeling the breeze in your hair adjusts your attitude to life.”
So, about COVID. This, of course, has affected the passenger sector.
Seastreak, Chamberlain said, operates at an overall capacity of 10 to 20% in those days.NY Waterway, reduced to a single road in March, reopened on a limited basis on June 29.They are now operating at about 7% of their capacity.said Arthur Edward Imperatore Sr. of Fort Lee, founder and president of NY Waterway, the guy who was credited, in the 1980s, with resurrecting the new York ferry formula.
Then it was positive. Now it’s positive.
“We will return bigger and more powerful than ever,” Imperatore, now 95.”We’re going to win.”
Typically, NY Waterway has an average of 32,000 passengers depending on the day, on 37 ferries, they pass through 10 terminals in New Jersey.On this specific Friday, mid-afternoon, there are only a handful of passengers, who can ‘not be fully explained at off-peak hours.”Be nice, sit here,” the stickers on the benches said, indicating how far passengers are.They were barely necessary.
“It was a challenge with COVID, it closed everything,” said Captain Mike Baranok, who led the Manhattan ferry on its slide to Weehawken after its tour.
Of course, in the age of masks and medical alerts, a small passenger list can be just a point of promotion.The same goes for an upper floor, instead of a locked, jammed meter or a PATH wagon.
“Right now there aren’t too many people and it’s an excellent and relaxing race,” said Laura Hamilton of North Bergen.”A great way to break the road.”
Apart from COVID, ferries have a developing industry.This summer, South Amboy, Middlesex County, won a $5.3 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration to build a passenger ferry terminal.And ferries have been a hit with the public.
“The number of passengers on the ferry has increased exponentially, year after year,” said Karen Imas, vice president of systems at the Waterfront Alliance, a regional defense organization.
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Now, after crossing our waterways with suspension bridges and rail tunnels, we seem to have taken over the nostalgia of the old-fashioned route.Or the ferries make more sense, and the bridges make less sense, than we thought.
“They’re coming back because of the ease of travel,” said Cortney Worrall, president and chief executive officer of the Waterfront Alliance.”And they offer a pleasure to travel.”
The history of the ascent, descent and ascent of the New York Ferry is older than New York itself.The city was still “New Amsterdam” when the first ferry began to come and go between Manhattan Island and what is now Brooklyn in 1642.
In 1661, New Jersey received its first ferry: it sailed between Communipaw (Jersey City) and Manhattan.The Staten Island Ferry was introduced in 1712.In 1904, 147 ferries operated in and around New York.
Most of them passed by the railways. In the days leading up to the tunnel, all trips between several states necessarily ended where New Jersey ended, and resumed on the other side of the Hudson.
This explains why the exercise with President Lincoln killed from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois, in 1865, had to be avoided in Jersey City, so that Lincoln’s body could be transported across the river by ferry..
“There were a lot of other people at the station and on the street.”Dennis Doran, a historian and former president of the Lincoln Association of Jersey City, told The Record in 2015.”They placed the coffin in a specially prepared place, very elaborate hearse, and was dragged through horses up and down in the street, so that other people can see it.”
The ferries shaped their age in a way that was not evident at the time.
The classic example of this is the Palisades amusement park at Fort Lee, which is still in mourning generations of North Jerseyns.
Since its opening in 1898, his fortune was related to the ferry.”In front of W.130th St.Ferry, New York” wore a 1909 poster.Once the GWB began to attract a giant number of cars to the draw, Starting in 1931 the neighbors began to complain and the days of the park were numbered, closed in 1971, the ferry – no one knew then – had served as a kind of protective valve, regulating the flow of other people in the area.
“The parks on the Jersey side, which gave other people the opportunity to have this vegetation and this open space, were largely available via the ferry,” Imas said.”On weekends, the ferries were at full capacity very early in the day.- and only a handful ran. All those other people were disappointed that the ferries had peaked and may not spend the day outside.”
But from the moment Hudson’s pipes began to leave rail traffic at Penn Station in 1910, followed by the opening of the Holland Tunnel to cars in 1927, ferries lived on a borrowed time.The George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel (1937) for The last nails of the coffin.
When the old film “Citizen Kane” (1941) premiered, the New York ferry already appeared to be a ghostly and unhappy emblem of the past.”One day, in 1896, I crossed into Jersey on the ferry,” says old Mr. . Bernstein from “Kane,” speaking in the shadow of the GWB.”There’s a woman waiting to come down. He dressed in white and dressed in a white umbrella.I only saw her for a second.” He didn’t see me at all, but I bet it hasn’t been a month since I didn’t think of this woman.”
Along the river, the old docks were rotting, the old ferries were sowing.One, the Mary Murray, was deserted for years on the Raritan River, near exit nine of the New Jersey Turnpike, a nostalgic landmark.He survived: the old two-pointed ferry, with two rudder bridges, which can come and go without having to turn around, but was actually an anachronism.
Enter Arthur Edward Imperatore Sr., the guy who put a defibrillator into the New York ferry business and surprised her again.
“It was largely luck and a lot of thought, ” said Imperatore.”I can see that the river is underutilized. All rivers: the East River, the Hudson River.For me, it’s very simple.”
You’re old enough to have experienced Hudson ferries for the first time.”I’ve known the ferry since I was a kid,” said Imperatore, a resident of western New York.”When we were kids, we used to sneak into the ferry and then walk to the subway.It’s a five-cent prize to get to Yankee Stadium.
Years later, in 1981, he bought more than two miles of waterfront assets between Weehawken and West New York for the miserable amount of $7.5 million: decaying train stations and deserted stations that were not married to much of the decaying infrastructure along the Jersey coast.it can become valuable residential assets, especially with this view of the Manhattan skyline, but first, it had to adapt to travelers.
On December 6, 1986, the Hudson saw something it had not noticed in decades: a ferry that departed from a slide in Weehawken and was heading to Manhattan.
The Imperial Port, as its first shipment called it, had a capacity of one hundred passengers. In that first race, there were five or six other people. “Arthur’s madness,” other people called it.
But as Gershwin’s old song comes out, they all laughed at Edison too.”Congestion suffocates the city, ” said Imperatore.No is an unusual sense.
This first terminal, built in turn from the shell of an abandoned ferry, located on the site of the Weehawken ferry hold, which he remembered as a child, is about two hundred meters south of the last one in Port Imperial, built in two hundred5 BC.accommodate the largest crowds and larger ships.New ferries in your fleet can bring up to 400, and were needed.
“Arthur’s Folly” multiplied on about 3 dozen ships, plus a fleet of 80 buses, on both sides of the river, to send passengers to major destinations.And the deserted coast imperatore became luxury condos, shops and equipment.The centers have multiplied: two in Weehawken, two in Hoboken, 4 in Jersey City and others in Edgewater in Bergen County and Belford in Monmouth.Ferries made the “golden coast” possible, just as running water made Los Angeles possible.
Imperatore is proud of its fleet. Even prouder when he makes the news, as he does from time to time, as a rescue squad. When the notorious Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger Flight 1549 crashed over the Hudson River in 2009, a NY Waterway ferry was the first to arrive. “I got the call, I gave the order,” Imperatore said.
This is a smart case for ferries.” It can be argued that ferries are an essential means of transport in an emergency,” Worrall said.”They can move other and intelligent people in times of crisis.”
But the most productive argument for ferries is Walt Whitman’s.
They unite us to the afterlife and to the future. And they bind us to our environment, in a way that bridges and tunnels can’t.Ferries take us to the water. But they also anchor us.
“They remind us that we are a region of islands and coasts,” Imas said.”They give us another one about our geography and communities, our open area and our outdoors.They’re a way to recommit to the region.New” York is a port city. New Jersey is a port state.”
Ferry schedules are necessarily fluid, given the COVID pandemic, it is to consult the most recent data on the following websites:
Jim Beckerman is a NorthJersey.com entertainment and culture journalist.For unlimited information on how you spend your free time, subscribe or activate your virtual account today.
Email: [email protected] Twitter: jimbeckerman1