East River Ferry Service Is Transforming America's First Suburbs

Brooklyn Heights became America's original suburb in 1814 with the maiden voyage of the Nassau, a steamship "carrying 549 passengers, one wagon and three horses" across the East River to Manhattan, wrote New York Times urban affairs correspondent, Sam Roberts, on Dec. 29, 2014. It would be at least 20 years before railroads began carrying passengers.

The East River Ferry, originally launched in 2011, took on new form after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his intention four years later to greatly expand it. Details of the "ferry gamble" were unveiled in June 2016. The gamble looks like it's paying off.

"About seven months after the city expanded and subsidized the privately run ferry service — reducing the fare from up to $6 to $2.75, [...] ridership is up and so are rents in neighborhoods that were once harder to reach," writes Stefanos Chen, real estate reporter for The New York Times, on Dec. 1. The ferry revival "is luring developers to a long-neglected stretch of the city’s industrial waterfront, from western Queens to south Brooklyn."

After decades of little change, there are now thousands of new apartments coming to the shores of the 16-mile strait, about a quarter of them reserved for lower-income renters.