Wall Street Ferry, New York City

Since the years of the Dutch settlement in Manhattan, in the first half of the 17th century, a ferry house existed at the waterfront near Wall Street. It was replaced by a fortified entrance after the wall was built in 1653, which was removed in the 1690s, during the English rule. The site housed a slave market in the 18th century and the structure seems to have also been used as a ferry house.

On June 16, 1852, the city granted to Jacob Sharp & Co. a lease for the Wall Street Ferry, for ten years. Ferry houses were built on both sides of East River, in Brooklyn, at Montague Street, and in Manhattan at the Foot of Wall Street. They were completed by April, 1853, with similar design. The ferry went into operation in May.

The ferry house at the Foot of Wall Street was originally two stories high, with a front elevation of 30 feet. The entire front was 93 feet. Depth, 147 feet. The reception room was in the center, 20 x 40 feet. On either side, two carriages gates and one passenger gate leaded to each bridge, which were covered the entire length. On the Brooklyn side, the ferry-house was built at the foot of a slope running from Montague Street. Three boast were built after the style of the boats running on Fulton Street.

By 1873, the Union Ferry Company, originally organized in 1839, controlled the Fulton, Wall Street, Hamilton and South Ferries.

The Wall Street Ferry building can also be seen in a photograph by Joshua Beals, in 1876, in his panorama of Manhattan. The building gained a new design and side towers between 1876 and 1879.

In the early decades of operation, the Wall Street Ferry bound for Manhattan carried a crowd of prominent Wall Street men, between 9 and 10 in the morning, many from Brooklyn Heights, a prosperous residential neighborhood of about six hundred houses by 1860.

The Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic in 1883 and divided the carriage and passenger transport across the East River. The opening of the interborough's tunnels under the East River, in the early 20th century, marked the beginning of the end for the ferry. The Wall Street Ferry closed on July 28, 1912.