Life Aboard an Ellis Island Ferry

BY CANDACE TAYLOR

Staten Island, N.Y.

After two decades, the MacKenzie-Childs artists are ready to sell their 118-year-old boat

Victoria MacKenzie-Childs recently replaced the vintage stove in her kitchen with a new stainless-steel grill.

“I was just ready for a change,” explains Victoria, whose shoulderlength hair is dyed rainbow colors and tied up with mismatched ribbons. After all, she says, “we’re practically camping anyway.”

She and her husband, Richard MacKenzie-Childs, are artists in their 70s who have lived for the past two decades on Yankee, a roughly 150-foot-long ferryboat built in 1907. The founders of the popular home-decor brand Mac-Kenzie-Childs have spent years filling the vessel with their colorful creations, from a gigantic shell wreath to whimsical lamps and vases made with bits of metal found in a nearby junkyard.

Much like the stove, however, the couple’s living situation is in need of a change. They are getting older, and so is Yankee, which is increasingly in need of repairs. Docked at an out-of-the-way Staten Island marina, it has been on and off the market for more than a decade and is currently for sale by the owners, asking $1.25 million.

One of the few surviving vessels of its age and type, Yankee is on the National Register of Historic Places. Built to service Maine’s Casco Bay islands, the steel-hulled steamer was later moved to New York Harbor, where in the 1920s it ferried immigrants to Ellis Island and then on to New York City. Later the boat carried passengers to the Statue of Liberty for tours, and served as a ferry to Rhode Is-land’s Block Island. The Navy used it for patrols and ferrying troops in Boston Harbor in World War I, and as a ferry to the Philadelphia Navy Yard in World War II.

In the 1980s, Yankee was sold for scrap, but an antique dealer bought it in 1990, towed it to Manhattan’s Pier 25 and began restoring it. That’s where Victoria and Richard eventually found it, around 2003.

The MacKenzie-Childses have always perceived the world through a unique lens. In the 1980s, they parlayed their quirky ceramic designs into the MacKenzie-Childs brand, selling checkerboard-patterned tea cups and fish-shaped dinner plates. But they lost the Aurora, N.Y.-based company and rights to the name in a 2001 bankruptcy sale, filing for personal bankruptcy a short time later. The legal proceedings from that time are still a sore spot for Victoria.

When they moved to New York City after losing the company, they couldn’t find an affordable place to rent on dry land, so Victoria set out on rollerblades to look for space on a boat. “I skated all the

FOR SALE

MILLION

Built in 1907, 10,000 sq. ft. across four levels

way around the island, stopping at every pier,” she says.

She declined to say how much they paid for Yankee, but says they quickly fell in love. They have poured nearly all of their resources into maintaining it, decorating it in their eclectic style and filling it with the ephemera they have made and collected. They appreciate not having neighbors, other than an ever-changing array of boats docked nearby. “I love the view— industry and nature,” Victoria says.

Yankee has about 10,000 square feet of space spread across four levels. The vessel still has some original details, including tongueand- groove siding, and from the outside it still looks much as it did carrying passengers to Ellis Island. On the passenger deck, a promenade with a 4-foot overhang has its original oak benches.

Inside, swinging rope chairs hang from the rafters. Dining tables can be raised and lowered by pulley. On the top deck, a bed is wedged between windows and the ship’s wheel.

“Everything is meant to shock us into being ourselves and have fun,” Victoria explains.

Below decks in the wood-paneled salon, every possible color, pattern and texture is represented. One wall is bright yellow and another is salmon-colored. A striped carpet is topped with a rug in a brightly colored geometric pattern. Fringed lampshades designed by Victoria have flowers on the outside and

—Victoria

colorful swirls on the inside. Blackand- white striped columns intersect with ceiling beams covered in floral wallpaper. “We call those our rosewood beams,” says Victoria.

On Yankee, “every corner I look at, anywhere I look, I just feel inspired,” she says, seated in a spindly, bright yellow chair in the salon.

Victoria and Richard met in the ceramics department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she was teaching and he was a student. They were married a few months later, but Victoria can’t say for sure what year that was. “I don’t keep track of time and dates,” she says with a laugh. “Just recently, someone said, ‘What year was Heather born in?’ Our daughter. And I said, ‘How would I know?’” Yankee is challenging to maintain. “We aren’t big welders,” Victoria notes. “We don’t have that kind of equipment or that kind of money.” They’re getting older, and their health is declining. At low tide, when the boat sits about 6 feet below the level of the dock, getting onto dry land requires mounting a wobbly step stool to reach the gangplank.

To help pay for the boat’s upkeep, they previously operated it as a bed-and-breakfast, and in 2021 Victoria set up a Patreon account. A friend gave them the new grill, along with a small Emeril Lagasse countertop oven, which Victoria used to bake a Kentucky transparent pie on a recent afternoon. Bustling around the tiny kitchen, she placed sugared cranberries on each slice.

The March day was chilly, and Yankee was unheated. To save money on fuel, the MacKenzie-Childses had already turned off the furnace for the season. Victoria was bundled up in an old-fashioned ankle-length coat with wide lapels.

When and if they sell the boat, Victoria says she would like to sell their possessions and live in a Tesla Cybertruck. In 2013 they sold the Evermore estate, their former home in New York’s Cayuga County, for $595,000, according to public records. They had listed it in 2011 for $1.1 million.

Gregor Collins, a family friend who is helping them market Yankee, sees the vessel becoming a floating restaurant, coffeehouse or tourist attraction.

Ferries have a bewitching effect on potential buyers, says historian David Moskowitz. “Many of them have this really beautiful, iconic architecture,” he says. But repurposing one can be prohibitively expensive, he says.

In 2022, “Saturday Night Live” stars Colin Jost and Pete Davidson, along with investors, bought a decommissioned Staten Island ferry at auction for $280,100. They plan to convert it into an entertainment destination with bars, a hotel and a theater for about $34 million.

Despite the MacKenzie-Childses’ devotion, Yankee is in disrepair, with peeling paint and rotting wood. The vessel hasn’t been seaworthy since they bought it, so tugboats have moved it the New York area when they have had to find new places to dock.