Water Barrier
As can be seen in the timetable shown earlier, the original western end of the LIRR was in Brooklyn; even the successful Boston - New York service never touched Manhattan. In the 1830s, the technologies and materials needed to construct tunnels under the river, or long bridges with clear spans over it, did not yet exist. Until that situation changed, Manhattan (except for a small corner of its northern end) would remain bounded by too much water for it to be connected to other land masses. One had to reach it by boat.
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Early 1800s lithographs of New York Harbor are usually picturesque scenes, dotted willy-nilly with toy-like boats. I think the intent was to depict the craziness of New York's water traffic. There were three-masters galore, little commercial schooners running errands, paddle-wheelers traveling up and down the river, one-man boats powered by sail (or oars!), and ferries forever shuttling between the shores.
David William Moody, View of Brooklyn, L.I. from U.S.Hotel, N.Y., 1846
New York Public Library Digital Collection
If you were a businessman setting out on a fast trip to Boston, you might not think twice of taking a ferry over to Brooklyn to start the trip. That was the 1840's equivalent of taking a cab to the airport for a flight to California.
If instead you were a clerk in an office, or a courier, you might find cheaper accommodation across the river than downtown. You would travel over the river twice a day, on a cheap, perhaps uncomfortable vessel. The ferry trip was the entirety (or maybe in some cases, the majority) of your commute. You accepted it as it was, because using it enabled you to live in better quarters than you could get for the same money in Manhattan.
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If you were an occasional visitor to downtown - say, someone who lived in Queens or further east - who came to Manhattan once or twice a year on business... well, then you had a long journey before you got to the river, and the ferry would cover less distance per minute than anything else you rode on that day. Ferries were not "big fish" in the river; they had to yield the right-of-way to river steamers, tugs, and ocean-going tall ships. You might have to wait a long time for your ferry because earlier crossings had put it behind schedule. Although an ideal crossing in a good steam ferry could take only a half hour, waiting to board, harbor congestion, rough water, fog, or mechanical issues could double the expected elapsed time.
The quality of the ride was inferior to what one experienced on a train, and perhaps even on a horse-drawn omnibus. Steamboats were still fairly new; some ferries instead were team boats. Picture two simple wooden sides with a flat wooden roof, mounted on a flat hull, everything put together to form a long floating box with no ends. More than 200 passengers could crowd inside, where at the center stood a team of horses, tethered so that they walked in place on a turntable. It rotated; a shaft connected it to a paddlewheel. The whole boat reeked of its history of hard-working horses and sweaty passengers, and as it crossed, it would be rocked a little by each new wave. Team boats were cheap to build, economical to operate, dependable, and slow. No one looked forward to riding on them in rush-hour, but the fare was cheap.
Steamboats were preferable to team boats. Like the trains of the era, they were thought fast, and they had risks. Like trains, steamboats might break down mid-trip - a very significant difference being that in such situations, ferries would be helplessly adrift on the water, whereas trains would be stuck where they were. Like trains, steamboats had boilers, which if carelessly tended might explode spectacularly. Again, the outcomes were different; train passengers usually survived, whereas ferry passengers usually died (the ferry invariably sank). As late as 1871, 66 people on a New York ferry died because of a boiler explosion.
Understandably, when an early 1800s Long Island resident returned safely home from Manhattan, s/he likely felt relieved, tired, and above all, grateful that such trips were rare.
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