Pete Davidson & the ferry MV John F. Kennedy Photo: Robert Miller for the NY Post
It sounds like the setup to a joke or a late-night skit — two comedians from NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Pete Davidson and Colin Jost, along with comedy club owner Paul Italia, just bought a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry boat. The group purchased the retired John F. Kennedy ferry for $280,100 through an online public auction. They plan on converting the 57-year-old, 277′ long iconic orange ferry into a live entertainment venue. Davidson and Jost are both Staten Island natives.
“The idea is to turn the space into a live entertainment event space, with comedy, music, art, et cetera,” Italia told the New York Post. “We’re in the early stages, but everybody involved had the same ambition — not to see this thing go to the scrapyard.”
Pete Davidson was seen at the St. George Ferry Terminal on Friday, admiring the decommissioned Staten Island Ferry he and “SNL” co-star Colin Jost bought this week at auction.
“It’s crazy,” Davidson said. “We used to take that ferry to do stand-up, all the time.”
“It’s sick,” he added approvingly. “In a year, it’ll be a comedy club restaurant.”
After posing for a photo with his new toy, a passerby asked Davidson, “Where are you going to put it?”
“Right now, we’re going to dock it in, I think, Gowanus, and do a bunch of work on it,” Davidson answered.
According to the Department of Transportation, the ship was taken out of service last August after two of its engines failed. The ship can’t travel under its own power.
Under the terms of the public auction, the group now has 10 days to retrieve the vessel from the St. George Ferry Terminal.
The trio is not the first to purchase a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry with plans for conversion. The transactions have generally not worked out well. James D. Walsh, writing in New York magazine sums it up in an article titled, Buying an Old Staten Island Ferry Is a Terrible Idea.
Walsh notes that in 1976, George Searle, a retired merchant mariner, bought the Mary Murray, a New Deal–funded Staten Island Ferry, at auction. Searle towed the boat up the Raritan River with the hopes of converting it into a restaurant. Instead, it sat beached and rusting on a riverbank for 34 years. The ferry was finally scrapped in 2008.
The Mary Murray’s fate didn’t deter Jacques Guillet of White Plains from purchasing the Herbert H. Lehman, a Kennedy-class ferry quite similar to the one the SNL guys just bought, for about $150,000 in 2008. Guillet planned to convert the ship into a floating dormitory for college students, but finding a place to berth the warehouse-size vessel proved too expensive. The ferry was scrapped in 2012.
We can only hope that Davidson, Jost, and Italia have better luck.
NYC DOT is dancing the hora and tarantella!
Many have been down this road.. Some have even succeeded
Where entertainment talent and business acumen rarely meet. A complete technical refit on an old ferry in addition to designing and decorating a venue subject to tremendous moisture and salt, hiring all the staff needed plus pay for talent, setting up a kitchen, docking and other normal operating expenses of a working ship, maintaining numerous engines complete with unstable fuel costs, and finally not being professional mariners which means they are going down the most expensive road when hiring professional mariners. That is just to begin with. I wish them luck, but they have really stacked the odds against themselves.
The art of the deal is to sell it for scrap whilst it is still worth more than they paid for it (taking into account towage, docking and removing toxic materials, naturally).