The good ship Yankee has had many names in her 118 years: Machigonne, Dida, Hook Mountain and League Island.
She served in the Navy during both world wars, and has been a tour boat for Lady Liberty. She's ferried passengers to Block Island and the Casco Bay Islands, and is also Ellis Island's last surviving passenger ferry. She’s been used for scrap. And she’s also been an antique dealer's pet project.
But since around 2003, the Yankee been the home and studio of artists Richard and Victoria MacKenzie-Childs. The ship will be one of dozens of stops open to the public for tours as part of Open House New York’s annual festival weekend on Oct. 17-19, with a full list to be announced on Friday.
And if you’ve got $1.25 million, the Yankee could be yours.
Richard and Victoria, both in their 70s, have spent the last two decades maintaining the Yankee, which they acquired shortly after losing their eponymous home-goods brand in a bankruptcy sale. In exchange for the home, purpose and palette the ship provides them, they keep her afloat and alive with outpourings of their effervescent creativity.
They've covered the space in their signature aesthetic: a colorful, old-timey maximalism of lace and paintings, pulley systems and patterned wallpaper. Original details from the 1907-built ship pair with swinging rope chairs, cozy furniture galore, brightly painted walls, steampunk trunks, diverse fabrics, and beds in unexpected places, including in the wheelhouse, behind the wheel, in the engine room, and in a guest room on the roof.
Over the course of more than 20 years, Richard and Victoria MacKenzie-Childs have made the ferry their home. It's now on sale for $1.25 million.
While the ship remains an extension of the couple, there's also the difficulty of living aboard a 150-foot-long, 10,000-square-foot iron-hulled steamship in New York. Rents for spaces to dock the Yankee have risen, so the MacKenzie-Childses have chosen to part with the ferry. They said they made this decision more than a decade ago, but parting and finding the right buyer have proven to be long-term pursuits.
“Yankee Ferry came to us via a tip from a friend, which is how we tend to find these things,” said Elis Shin, Open House New York’s deputy director and lead producer for this year’s event. The festival grants New Yorkers mostly free entry to a host of generally hard-to-access spaces.
“This is a truly unique houseboat and we’re so excited to get to share how some New Yorkers live this way,” Shin added.
Timed tours of Yankee Ferry will go from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 18. Tickets are $7 — the Yankee and a few other locations charge the small fee to discourage no-shows — and are expected to quickly sell out after becoming available at noon on Oct. 3.
Tours will take place on Staten Island, where the Yankee is currently docked at a shipbuilding and repair facility off Mariners Harbor.
Staten Island is only the Yankee’s most recent home under the MacKenzie-Childses’ ownership. Although the ship hasn’t been seaworthy since they bought her, the couple have moved the Yankee from Tribeca — where they found and fell in love with her — to New Jersey and back to the boroughs over the years.
The Yankee Ferry had several homes before it docked in Staten Island.
“The real estate of land and water is so tight now, and so valuable. We ended up being here, paying through the nose,” Victoria said Monday from the Yankee’s kitchen, recalling the couple’s days docked off Pier 25 in Manhattan.
“Every child learned to ride their bike on the pier," she said. "There was a big garden in the middle that everybody in the neighborhood contributed to, and sand volleyball that we had just made ourselves there — nothing like what it is now."
The city demolished (and eventually rebuilt) Pier 25 and, with the couple unable to find another place to dock in Manhattan, the Yankee headed to New Jersey for what turned into a multiyear sojourn off a derelict pier in Hoboken. There, the MacKenzie-Childses grew corn, peanuts and Brussels sprouts out of tires they laid along the dock, and “fed the neighborhood,” Victoria said.
Sometime after Hurricane Sandy, they found yet another new home at Brooklyn's Gowanus Bay Terminal. Victoria said they were eventually forced out by the landlord and ended up on Staten Island, within swimming distance of Shooters Island.
“The sunrises, the sunsets, the island, the swans sleeping under our windowsill. I mean, who has this?” she said. “And the people, the men on these piers, they’ve been in this industry of maritime work for centuries, generation after generation, they’re from all countries. They’re such gentlemen.”
The Yankee will be one of dozens of stops open to the public for tours as part of Open House New York’s annual festival weekend on Oct. 17-19. Tickets are $7.
In Staten Island, the Yankee briefly became a boatel, and brought Victoria together with her friend Veronica Lanni.
“I just Googled ‘Staten Island’ because I said, ‘Hey, we never go there, maybe I’ve driven through it twice in my whole life, let’s see what’s there,’” said Lanni, a lifelong Bronx resident. “Yankee Ferry was the first thing to come up.”
She rang the listed number to inquire about tours. Victoria informed Lanni they no longer offered them, but she’d make an exception. Lanni became Victoria’s assistant, helping out around the boat and with digital communication, and sometimes staying in one of the guest bedrooms.
The Open House New York tour will be the Yankee’s first tour for the public in about five years. Hosting has simply proven too challenging in recent years, Victoria said, though sharing the Yankee with the world remains among her favorite things.
"She's the most important vessel on the sea as far as her accomplishments," she said. "I mean, she changed the world, really, when you think of it. And for longer than any other ferry boat anywhere."
