Staten Island Ferry

A free ferry across the whole harbor, past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

Local name: Staten Island Ferry — Whitehall Terminal

Collection: New York · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Whitehall Terminal, opened in 2005 · Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Whitehall Terminal, where the Staten Island Ferry leaves from. It is one of the best free rides in New York. In twenty-five minutes the ferry crosses 5.2 miles of harbor. On the way you can see the towers of Lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Governors Island. Boatmen were already carrying people across the harbor in the eighteenth century. In 1810 sixteen-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt of Staten Island bought a small sailing boat. By one account, the hundred dollars for it was a birthday gift; by another, he borrowed it from his mother. He began carrying people to the southern tip of Manhattan. Vanderbilt later became one of the richest men in the world. In 1817 the first steam ferry to Staten Island, the Nautilus, went into service. In 1905 the city took over the crossing. The fare was abolished in 1997. Today the ferry runs around the clock, three hundred sixty-five days a year. It carries more than sixteen million passengers a year. On weekdays five boats make one hundred seventeen trips. The largest ferry holds more than five thousand people. The terminal building in front of you is new. The old one was gutted by fire on the eighth of September 1991, and the present terminal opened on the eighth of February 2005.

Visiting

Whitehall Terminal, 4 South Street, next to The Battery; the South Ferry subway station is right next door, under The Battery. The ferry is free and runs around the clock; at rush hour it leaves every fifteen minutes. To come back, you have to get off on Staten Island and walk through the terminal building again.