The restored S.S. Columbia will create significant benefits for New York City residents by delivering educational and cultural programming to all five boroughs revitalizing our experience of NYC’s waterfront and of its greatest open space - its harbor. The city’s waterfront traditionally served as a point of interface and gateway between the city, the Hudson Valley, the Erie Canal, the Great Lakes and through the Narrows - to the greater world. Over the past 30 years, as ships have ceased to come and go, the NYC Waterfront has been losing its historic character as a gateway to the larger world.

The Columbia will visit waterfront neighborhoods throughout the 5 boroughs of NYC delivering educational and cultural programming. This experience, available to a full spectrum of NYC residents, will again make our waterfronts a venue for dynamic new experiences; and a gateway to the larger world, restoring a historic characteristic of the NYC waterfront that has been lost.

Excursion steamers like the Columbia were once ubiquitous on the waterfronts of NYC. Preceding the automobile era, these vessels provided NYC with access to the open water, sky and greenery beyond the city’s borders. Steamboats such as the Columbia helped to foster the development of environmentally oriented urban leisure and recreation. The Columbia represents the only viable opportunity to re-introduce a kind of naval architecture that was once a ubiquitous part of the experience of NY harbor. The recent return in Brooklyn Bridge Park of the floating pools that were once prevalent in the harbor is another example of restoring elements of our waterfronts that we wish to preserve, and interpreting our waterfront as a site of historical interaction between our built and natural environments.

The Columbia’s grand scale and capacities allow for possibilities for cultural and educational programming that smaller scaled vessels cannot provide. Her ballroom and Grand Salon present a unique opportunity for furthering community development through educational programming and the creation of a shared mobile communal cultural space for New York Harbor to be enjoyed by all the boroughs of the city. The restored vessel will incorporate sustainable technologies and serves as a perfect educational tool illustrating our evolving paradoxical relationship to the environment. Built to take people out of the city into the beauty of nature at the turn of the century; the Columbia spewed coal smoke and soot into the air and dumped sewage into the waters. Later the vessel was adapted to burn cleaner oil fuels and no longer dumped sewage. In restoration bio –diesel and sustainable technologies will be utilized in ways that are interpreted to the public as part of the educational and cultural mission of the project.

The restored SS Columbia will help to revive the relationship between the New York City and its waterfront by drawing people to the waters edge for reasons beyond passive scenic recreation thereby reviving a historic and cultural context that is presently lost. The Columbia represents a final opportunity to reintroduce the benefit of this kind of historical and cultural context to the waters of NY harbor.

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