Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot
ferry depot in Manhattan

Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot was the main ferry terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the West Shore Railroad on the North River (Hudson River) in lower Manhattan. The railroads operated ferries to their terminal stations on the Hudson River waterfront in New Jersey at Exchange Place and Weehawken, respectively.
The depot was next to Liberty Street Ferry Terminal from which the Central Railroad of New Jersey operated its Communipaw ferry to Communipaw Terminal.
History
As early as July 1764 a ferry began operating from Paulus Hook to Mesier's dock which was located at the foot of Courtland Street (where Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot would be built). Almost immediately and for several decades subsequently, a complicated series of legal battles broke out over who should operate the ferries, where the crossing(s) should be located and at what rate passengers and other cargo should be charged for the journey.
The first steam ferry service in the world began operations in 1812 between Paulus Hook and Manhattan and reduced the journey time to a then remarkable 14 minutes. With the arrival of the railroad station at Paulus Hook in 1834 and the arrival of the Morris and Essex Railroad service on October 14, 1836 the number of passengers and the value of the Jersey City Ferry continued to increase.
The terminal was located one block west of the Ninth Avenue Elevated's Cortlandt Street Station which operated from 1874 until 1940.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot” is ferry depot in Manhattan. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cortlandt, Street and Ferry, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29469845. Authority coordinates are 40.712, -74.015. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1764, 1812, 1834 and 1836.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.