Passage III

Ports of Recall: Hudson River Ferries

The first steam-powered ferry on the Hudson River, the Juliana, left Hoboken, New Jersey, for New York City on October 11, 1811, in the nineteenth century. Ferries, mostly of the small sailboat kind called sloops, had been traveling on the Hudson for centuries, carrying cargo and passengers. What made steamboat travel so revolutionary was speed. A trip from New York City to Albany, for example, took seven days in a sloop, a steamboat shortened that trip to one day. Less vulnerable to the weather, steam-powered ferries were reliable, and thus their popularity grew.

Onboard these ferries, commuters crossed from homes in Hoboken to jobs in Manhattan. Society’s upper echelon meandered on scenic upriver excursions. “Passengers” sometimes included horses, goats, and chickens. Many of these vessels offered rudimentary comforts at best. Others, from that time period, boasted an elegance that unsurpassed the river. For a while, older styles of ferries, such as those powered by horses brought onboard to turn a paddle wheel, continued to operate. But the steam-powered ferries, hundreds of them, ruled the Hudson River for most of the nineteenth, and part of the twentieth centuries.

Bear Mountain Bridge was built by the Harriman family. Until bridges spanned the Hudson River—more than a mile wide in places, car owners relied on ferries to transport their vehicles from one shore to the other. Bearing names like Elmira, Lackawanna, Tuxedo, and Skillypot, ferry travel helped transform the region into one of the biggest economic and cultural centers of the world. At its’ peak in 1927, ferry service between New Jersey to New York reached twenty-seven million passengers annually. In a few years that number plummeted. The Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel, later renamed the Holland Tunnel, opened in 1927, followed by the George Washington Bridge in 1931. By the time the first cars traveled 1.5 miles through the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937, the golden age of ferries on the Hudson had ended.