The Port Morris Ferry Bridges in October, 2013. The only Floats i’ve seen with corrugated sheathing covering their iron skeleton, perhaps because most floats were moving products, and the Port Morris Ferries moved people, although prior to 1947, it moved both goods and people around New York harbor.
These shots were done in October, 2013 and are the last views i have seen of the structures to date.
One is kept at bay from viewing the floats by good fencing, a staffed site making the floats as inaccessible as it has ever been. Presently it’s an unidentified NYPD operation. (When i worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard 30 years ago, i ran across the headquarters for TNT, the famed NYPD narc unit, one day, so who knows) Before that it was, i think, an MTA operation. It was possible to get in, though the risk of arrest was high – it was behind a bustling city operation. It’s become far more secure and is impossible to get close to now.
The Floats were installed in 1947 for ferry service to the city-owned islands of Rikers, Brother and Hart. For instance, workers that built the prison at Riker’s Island used the ferry. In fact, one of the more unusual events was the explosion of a ferry boat boiler while docking at Riker’s in 1932.
It’s an area still zoned for heavy industry, in the background is the Locust Street Hell Gate Power Plant. There is a tiny area of gentrification along Willow Street a few blocks away, but this end of Port Morris, south of the Bruckners is probably the most industrialized section of the city.
I wouldn’t want to ruin the industry of Port Morris for any sort of gentrification, or that which would attract it. RealStill has lived and experienced the thoughts and actions of do-gooders, who get called that for not fully realizing any action in this world is simultaneously positive and negative, but that’s accessed by experience, which is getting rarer. Today being an island, living in you own world, is considered a good thing.
Speaking of islands – when Riker’s Prison is closed and torn down, and Brother and Hart are open to the public, then, with the city still owning this dock, a new ferry service could be put in place, that once more transported folks, but one that wouldn’t invite more job demolition through gentrified landmarks like the High Line in Manhattan.
But the new ferrys don’t need floats. And you have no choice with the Port Morris Floats – preserve them, demolish them or let them rot, in untouched, fenced-in organic descent. Preservation was achieved in Long Island City but the land around it was all dead industry and then became high-rise and residential.
They could put a wide path back to the floats, and they would be off limits, but you could sit on comfortable benches, and industry could still function all around it. It would be the first real industrial preservation, embedded in the meilieu it belongs. Amnd with plenty of parking with a big sky.
Floats with purely industrial functions wouldn’t waste their money on architectural details or trying to hide the structure’s use and function, but corrugated steel isn’t exactly a limestone facade with ornamentation either, and the folks who used these docks were primarily workers building on and maintaining the islands of New York Harbor. The Port Morris Floats, when they moved workers, they were blue-collar, and often going to sites throughout the upper harbor, to build things.