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 may 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 the joy of crossing into Manhattan on a 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 late 20th century, couldn’t know, is that the Manhattan ferry would make an impressive return to the 21st when, in the end, Walt Whitman got it right.
Travellers, during the 20 years, have rediscovered the ferry.
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“You can’t beat him,” said Jon Yasmer of Verona, who crossed from Port Imperial, Weehawken, to West 39th Street in Manhattan on a recent Friday afternoon.
“It’s a beautiful view, you have a big breeze and it’s a way into the water,” Yasmer said, “and you’ve been given a little tan.”
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 ferries from NYC Ferry, the city’s company that, since 2015, has been traveling among New Yorkers in the city’s neighborhoods: downtown, east to west, and even the Statue of Liberty.New York Water Taxi, has a normal round trip bus, suspended now due to COVID-19, which runs 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 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-19. This, of course, has affected the passenger sector.
Seastreak, Chamberlain said, is operating between 10% and 20% of its overall capacity in those days.NY Waterway, reduced to a single road in March, reopened on a limited basis on June 29.It works at about 7% of its capacity now,” said Arthur Edward Imperatore Sr. of Fort Lee, founder and president of NY Waterway, the guy who is 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 per day, out of 37 ferries, passing through 10 terminals in New Jersey.On this Friday mid-afternoon, there are only a handful of passengers, which cannot be fully explained through the hours of less activity.”Stay well, sit here,” said the stickers on the benches that indicated how far the passengers sit.They were hardly necessary.
“This has been a challenge with COVID. It closed everything,” said Captain Mike Baranok, who guided 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 are not too many people and it is an excellent and relaxing race,” said Laura Hamilton of North Bergen. “A great way to break the road.”
In addition to COVID-19, 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 success among 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.
Back to the future! Retrograde progress, backing up and moving forward, turns out to be a hallmark of our time.We invented nuclear power plants and then realize that, after all, old windmills can simply be better.I prefer vinyl.
Now, after crossing our waterways with suspension bridges and railway tunnels, we seem to have taken nostalgia for the old-fashioned route.Or ferries make more sense — and bridges make less sense — than we thought.
“They return due to ease of travel,” said Cortney Worrall, president and CEO 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: sailing 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 of bringing President Abraham Lincoln’s frame from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois, in 1865, had to be prevented in Jersey City, so that Lincoln’s frame could be transported across the river by ferry.maximum pit prevent.
“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 harvest of this region is the Palisades amusement park in Fort Lee, which still laments through generations of northern Jerseyers.
Since its opening in 1898, his fortune was related to the ferry.”In front of W.130th St.Ferry, New York” sported a 1909 sign.Once the George Washington Bridge began to attract a giant number of cars to the inion 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 at the time, 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, and after the holland tunnel opened to cars in 1927, ferries lived in a borrowed time.They’ll be the last nails in the coffin.
When the old film “Citizen Kane” (1941) premiered, the New York ferry already appeared to be an unhappy and ghostly emblem of the past.”One day, in 1896, I crossed into Jersey on the ferry,” says old Mr. Bernstein of Kane, speaking in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.”There’s a woman waiting to come down. He dressed in white and dressed with 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-ended ferry, with two helmsmans, which can come and go without having to turn around, but it 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, she bought more than two miles of waterfront assets, between Weehawken and West New York, for the miserable amount of $7.5 million: decaying and deserted stations that were not married to such deteriorated infrastructure along Jersey’s waterfront.simply becoming 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 noticed in decades.A ferry, departing from a jetty in Weehawken, headed for Manhattan.
The Imperial Port, as its first shipment called it, had a capacity of one hundred passengers.During this first descent, there were five or six other people.”Arthur’s madness” was called by other people.
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 his fleet. Even more proud when it’s news, as it does from time to time, as a rescue squad.When Chesley’s well-known 1549 “Sully” Sullenberger crashed over the Hudson River in 2009, a NY Waterway ferry was the first to arrive.”They gave me the call, I gave the order, ” said Imperatore.
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, for the latest data on the following websites:
Jim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture journalist for NorthJersey.com.If you want unlimited information on how you spend your free time, subscribe or activate your virtual account today.
Email: [email protected] Twitter: jimbeckerman1