Full Steam Ahead
“The situation is most
convenient, in a charming spot in the country, with the finest walks
conceivable at our door, and it is in our power at any time to be in the heart
of New York in twenty minutes.”
Last April we left James Stuart
and his wife, our Scots travelers, in mid-December of 1829, moving from their
boarding house in New Rochelle, New York; as it was closing for the winter.
While they made their plans for upcoming travels they had settled temporarily
in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Their boarding house is run by a
Mr. and Mrs. Van Boskerck, a couple in their sixties, who live there with their
two maiden daughters, who actually manage the business. Only one other boarder
is in residence at the time. Leaving the operations to his daughters, Mr. Van
Boskerck makes several trips a week over to Manhattan to drum up trade. Stuart
will be paying a number of visits to the city as well. They most likely made
their commutes on a steam ferry owned by elderly inventor and Revolutionary War
veteran Colonel John Stevens, rather than aboard a rival vessel belonging to
young Staten Island native Cornelius Vanderbilt. At the close of the revolution
Stevens bought extensive land along three miles of lower Hudson River property
confiscated from the estate of Loyalist William Bayard. Over the past ten years
he’s begun making improvements to the property. The stretch of marshy New
Jersey land had cost Stevens today’s equivalent of $90,000 (which will buy you
almost a fifth of a condominium there today) and he’d chosen to name the site
Hoboken, after the Dutch name Hoebuck, or High Bluff. Today it’s the site of
the Stevens Institute of Technology.
It was at one end of this
property that the Van Boskerck house stood, so his loyalties would have been to his
neighbor’s fleet of steam vessels. In addition to four steamboats making runs
between New York and Albany, Stevens and his four sons operate a number of
other boats between here and Manhattan and to Philadelphia, as well as
stagecoaches across much of New Jersey. In the upcoming year Vanderbilt will
become an increasingly large thorn in the sides of the five Stevenses,
decreasing his fares to the point of unprofitability, eventually forcing them
to buy him out at a cost of $100,000 plus ten annual payments of $5,000. The
Commodore didn’t mess around.
Both Stuart and Van Boskerck had
an easy commute. An eight minute walk to the Stevens dock down by the water,
where the family manufactured their own vessels, and a ten-minute crossing in
one of the four ferries, all of which can accommodate entire stagecoaches,
which the passengers needn’t get out of. You have your choice of two landing
sites, the foots of Barclay and Canal streets. All of this for a whopping
sixpence sterling (only threepence during the summer months).
The Stevens family has other
sources of income besides their basic transportation business. Spaces on the
boats are rented out to concessionaires, who sell, “liquor, fruit,
confectionaries, &c.” They also lease out their own hotel here on the New
Jersey side. They charge pedestrians nothing for the privilege of strolling
along public walks they laid out along the river. They do all right what with
all those three- and sixpence fares to get there, thank you.
© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte
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