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Acknowledgments
Shortly after 2:30 p.m. on October 15, 2003, I hurried my teenage niece and nephew into the Whitehall Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry. They had come to visit me in New York, where I had lived since 1986, and I thought we could do no better on their first day in town than to take the ferry. We just missed the 2:30 sailing, and had to wait half an hour to board the Andrew J. Barberi . Twenty minutes after we boarded, the Barberi smashed into a service pier on Staten Island. Now I had to shoo my niece and nephew out of the way of a mob of panicking commuters who were racing back from the bow. We were on the upper deck, and saw no carnage; it was not until we returned to Manhattan that we realized it had been a catastrophe, one that eventually cost the lives of eleven passengers. It was the deadliest transit accident in New York in more than a century.
From the moment of impact, I knew we had been caught in a historic event. As my nephew and I handed out life jackets—and as I scanned the deck to see if the Barberi was listing, and in danger of sinking—I thought to myself, I've studied ferry disasters; now I'm in one . We returned to Whitehall on the last ferry to run that day, where we gave our accounts to a crowd of reporters. It was peculiar to find myself delivering the sort of information I was consuming to write this book.
I had been at work on it for more than a year already, and was struck by the coincidence that I was writing a biography of the man who founded the Staten Island Ferry. * The 150 or so years between my subject and me matter far more, however. It is a gulf that requires immense effort to span, even in the imagination. Matters conscious and unconscious—grand political issues, meanings of words, social expectations, even the smell of the air—all must be reconstructed, but never can be completely. It is a literary and historical endeavor that cannot be carried out alone.
This book was the product of endless assistance: from archivists who ultimately hold the secrets, in disassembled pieces; from the scholars who created the historiographical context and interpretive framework; from my editor and fellow writers who offered their insights; from institutions that gave financial and research support; and from family and friends, who offered not only emotional and material aid, but have shaped my personal understanding of humanity, the ultimate resource for any biographer.
First I must thank my wife, Jessica Stiles, who has supported and inspired me. Our meeting, long engagement, move to California, wedding, honeymoon, move to San Francisco, and birth of our first child all fall entirely within the brackets of my work on this book. I'm not sure she knew what she was in for. Her love, creativity, sensitivity, hard work, and fine talent as a writer have made it possible for me to complete this book, and I am grateful.
I must also thank the rest of my family, who have supported me unstintingly I am grateful to my parents, Dr. Clifford and Carol Stiles, who always encouraged my interests, and even endured my decision to forgo an academic career after I had devoted years to graduate school. They have always been there for me. I must thank my sister Colleen Stiles for her creative assistance, and her son and daughter, Keegan and Kevyn Stokes, who survived the Andrew J. Barberi with me in 2003.
I include my wife's clans in my definition of family, and they offered abundant help before and after our move to California. I should single out my brothers-in-law Patrick and Kevin McKenna and sister-in-law Elizabeth McKenna, their parents, Susan and Michael McKenna, and my wife's grandparents, Jack and Ruth Kahoun. I owe a special debt to my grand-mother-in-law, Elizabeth Frank, and her family, who let Jessica and me live for a year in the Frank home of the past sixty years, a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, where I wrote Part Two of this book. Friends and relatives of friends helped as well,