The two o’clock boat: the real ferry under Blood Beneath the Harbor

People ask whether the ferry in Blood Beneath the Harbor is real. Most of it is. The parts that are not are the parts you would expect.

What is true

The Staten Island Ferry runs between St. George, on the north shore of Staten Island, and Whitehall, at the bottom of Manhattan. The crossing is about five miles and takes about twenty-five minutes. It runs all day and all night, every day of the year, and it has been free to ride since 1997. On the way across you pass the Statue of Liberty close enough to see her face, and on the way back the whole of Lower Manhattan stands up out of the water at you. Tourists ride it for the view. Staten Islanders ride it because it is how you get home.

The city took over the ferry itself in 1905. That is the year Zack Vasco first boards in the book, and it is not a coincidence.

The year before, in June 1904, the excursion steamboat General Slocum caught fire in the East River with more than a thousand people aboard, most of them families from the German parish on the Lower East Side on a church outing. A thousand and twenty-one people died. Until September 2001, it was the deadliest single day in the history of New York City. When Zack says the harbor woke the year it swallowed a thousand and twenty-one souls, that is the year he means. The thing that woke is mine. The number is not.

Why two in the morning

Overnight the boats run roughly once an hour, so the two o’clock has a congregation instead of a crowd. Nurses coming off doubles. Tug crews. Hotel night staff. People who are awake at that hour are awake for a reason, and they are mostly too tired to pretend otherwise. I wanted a vampire who had chosen to spend a hundred and twenty years among exactly those people, on a boat that is free, where nobody checks who you are. A man who keeps a gate does not need a castle. He needs a schedule.

Zack’s schedule in the book is precise, and that precision is the character. He boards at 1:42. He walks aft at 1:58. He counts the wake in fours. If you have ever ridden the stern at night you will know why a person might: the wake runs back off the boat in two long ridges that fold over each other and come apart, and it is the kind of thing a mind holds on to when there is nothing else to hold.

What I invented

Zack. Anjali. The line at the stern that nobody from the city remembers giving him permission to tie. The silver-haired gentleman who pays strangers’ fares on a boat that has not charged a fare in nearly thirty years, which is the first thing about him that should frighten you. The gate under the harbor. All of that is fiction, and the book carries the usual notice saying so.

The loose bolt on the upper deck that ticks when a container ship’s wake comes under you, the door you have to pull toward you before it gives, the diesel that settles into your coat and is still there in the closet the next morning. I will let you decide about those.

If you ride it

Go at night if you can. Ride the stern. It is colder and the view is of where you have already been, which is the point. Nobody comes aft. You will have it to yourself, or almost.

And if you want the rest of Zack’s night, the book is here, with the first pages free to read.