Carteret To Buy Its First Boat From NY Waterway For Ferry Service

CARTERET, NJ — Carteret now has a ferry boat! It's one step closer for Mayor Dan Reiman's dream of one day running ferry service from Carteret to Manhattan — but construction has not yet started on the ferry terminal, nor has a ferry service provider been secured.

Reiman announced this week that the town will be purchasing one single ferry boat from NY Waterway, which runs ferries back and forth between New Jersey's Gold Coast and New York on the Hudson River.

Carteret will pay Port Imperial Ferry Corp. (doing business as NY Waterway) $2.25 million to purchase one single 149-passenger ferry boat from them.

The boat will run from the north end of Carteret Waterfront Park to the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. So far, it will just be one single boat and construction on the ferry terminal has not yet started.

The Carteret town Council officially approved the deal to buy the boat on Dec. 9.

Reiman has been talking about launching a ferry service to New York City for several years now. For the past few years, the town of Carteret has been amassing more than $13 million in state and federal grants to launch the ferry service.

Mayor Reiman previously said construction on the ferry terminal will begin in summer 2022. Construction on the terminal is contingent on completion of dredging currently being done in that section of the Arthur Kill, and approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Carteret ferry terminal is proposed to lie at the north end of Carteret Waterfront Park, at the new Carteret boat marina along the Arthur Kill. It would take about 25 minutes for the ferry boat to reach Lower Manhattan.

The building would have a waiting area, restrooms, food court/snack bar, operations center, meeting space and a rooftop observation deck.

For the past several years now, Carteret and South Amboy have been in somewhat of a competition with each other to launch ferry service to New York City.

The South Amboy ferry terminal will be located at 1 Radford Ferry Road, next to the Manhattan Beach Club, a currently under-construction 1,875-unit luxury apartment complex.

The trip from South Amboy to Lower Manhattan is about 40 minutes by boat.

Both Carteret and South Amboy are blue-collar, working-class towns are trying to reinvent themselves as attractive NYC bedroom communities, similar to the way Jersey City and Hoboken transformed their waterfronts.

Reiman has a further vision to surround Carteret's ferry terminal with as-of-yet-unbuilt condos, office and retail space and boardwalk shops. As Patch reported last fall, Carteret is currently building a $13.25 million boardwalk/river walk all along the Carteret Arthur Kill waterfront.

Prior: Carteret Ferry Terminal To Break Ground This Summer, Mayor Vows (Oct. 2021)

Sign up for Patch emails: https://patch.com/subscribe and don't miss important local news. Contact this Patch reporter: Carly.baldwin@patch.com