A History of Local Ferry Accidents
In February 1983, a passenger on a Circle Line ferry to Liberty Island fell overboard and drowned. In 2004, Spalding Gray is believed to have committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry. But it’s not only falling off the boat that presents a danger: in July 1977, “an elderly bootblack” drowned; losing his eyesight from diabetes, he “was rushing to meet his son… on a departing ferry when he went to the edge of the wrong slip and plunged into the cold waters… a deckhand tried to help… by looping a pole hook through his belt, but the belt snapped and [he] was washed into the wake of the… ferry on which his 55-year-old son had been riding.”