We still see the flat deck and hopper barges carrying gravel, construction equipment, and the odd artwork around the harbor. Tanker barges joined the mix late, after barrels and small ships gave way to supertankers. The covered barge, which carried mixed lots of weather-averse goods to and from box cars, was a very common barge type that has largely disappeared. Up until World War II, all these barges had captains, who lived aboard, often with their families. The captains served as watchmen, ensured mooring lines were secure while dockside, and often made sure goods reached their destinations. Lighterage came at no extra charge from Spuyten Duyvil and the Hellgate to the Narrows and the Arthur Kill, so barges might wind up at a wide variety of locations. This posed challenges for barge kids who sometimes came home from school to find their house had moved or woke up in some unexpected part of the harbor.

Barges tended to congregate in basins (artificial sheltered bays, typically surrounded by warehouses) and around certain piers. Often, these moorages also received lots of canal boats, mostly from the Erie Canal, though boats from the Morris and Delaware and Raritan Canals were also active. Like lighterage barges, canal boats also housed families and quite a community grew up among the people of these unpowered vessels. Prominent communities included Brooklyn’s Erie and Atlantic Basins, Piers 5 and 6 at Coenties Slip in Manhattan, and the Morris Basin in Jersey City. The Seamen’s Church Institute’s collection of photos includes several images of canal boats and barges at Piers 5 and 6. The sign outside their headquarters at 25 South Street attested that they served bargemen as well as sailors.

Many canal boats overwintered in New York Harbor while the canals were shut down due to ice. Since they couldn’t earn money by moving cargo on the canals, many picked up hardy vegetables like potatoes and cabbages on their final trip of the season to sell over the winter. Some even brought loads of eels to the city. Some canal boats took up lighterage work to supplement their income, and other canallers had regular winter jobs in the city, like teaching. Retired lighterage barges have been repurposed in a variety of ways. Newspaper accounts from the 1920a tell of the daughters of William W.A. Stone, a coal baron governor of Pennsylvania who found, on their father’s death, that their inheritance amounted to little and took to living on an abandoned barge on the Harlem River (possibly as a publicity stunt). The more vivacious sister aspired to be an opera singer but wound up working at Texas Guinan’s club till she married poet and editor Henry Harrison. I’ve yet to find any trace of her more reserved sister, a sculptor. See Cole Thompson’s excellent article on this story for further details.

In Sold to the Ladies!, Dorothy A. Bennett, first Assistant Curator of the Hayden Planetarium and co-creator of the Little Golden Book series, recounted how she and two friends bought a covered barge at auction on the Gowanus Canal. They fixed it up (losing some tools over the side that the EPA will no doubt recover in their Superfund dredging project) and had it towed to Manhasset Bay as a summer retreat. Barge Music and the River Cafe at Fulton landing are repurposed steel barges, and much of The Frying Pan bar at Pier 66 (26th St) consists of an Erie Lackawanna Railroad car float. The remains of derelict barges can still be found in forgotten backwaters like Coney Island Creek and the Gowanus Canal (as of this writing).

The oldest covered barge still afloat in the harbor is also the best place to learn more about these vital links in NYC’s infrastructure. If you have the Urban Archive iOS App, you can check out the Waterfront Museum’s audio tour on Urban Archive. The museum, based out of a 1914 Lehigh Valley Railroad covered barge moored at 290 Conover St on the western tip of Red Hook, is normally open on Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons, however, it’s currently closed for the pandemic.