Fulton Ferry Landing and The River Café: The Cradle of Brooklyn

Why is it significant?

Walk out onto the historic wooden pier at Fulton Ferry Landing and take in the panoramic water gate where modern New York was forged. The tide rushes vigorously through the narrow East River strait, slapping against the timber pilings while commuter ferries glide smoothly toward their docks.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk out onto the historic wooden pier at Fulton Ferry Landing and take in the panoramic water gate where modern New York was forged. The tide rushes vigorously through the narrow East River strait, slapping against the timber pilings while commuter ferries glide smoothly toward their docks. Across the water, the financial skyscrapers of Wall Street rise like an imposing canyon of glass and steel, framed on your right by the soaring suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge.

This modest shoreline slip is the historic cradle of Brooklyn transit: in eighteen fourteen, inventor Robert Fulton inaugurated the world's first scheduled steam ferry service here with his double-hulled paddleboat, the Nassau. By slashing the unpredictable river crossing from hours to a dependable twelve minutes, Fulton transformed rural Brooklyn into America's first commuter suburb. On this very ground in August seventeen seventy-six, General George Washington executed his miraculous nighttime evacuation of nine thousand Continental troops under cover of morning fog following the disastrous Battle of Long Island. Throughout the nineteenth century, as many as fifty million passengers passed through this bustling maritime terminal annually, making it one of the busiest passenger transit interchanges anywhere on the globe before the opening of the great suspension bridges.

Beside the ferry slip sits the iconic River Café, established in nineteen seventy-seven by restaurateur Michael O'Keeffe on a permanently moored floating barge: it single-handedly pioneered New American cuisine and became one of the country's most romantic culinary institutions.

Look down at the bronze relief map and poetic lines embedded in the pier deck: Walt Whitman penned his transcendent masterpiece Crossing Brooklyn Ferry while riding these same waters back and forth from his newspaper office in the eighteen fifties.

Stroll south along the landscaped green lawns of Brooklyn Bridge Park toward the monumental granite terrace of Pier 1.