EDGEWATER

Demolition of historic Binghamton ferry begins

EDGEWATER — Demolition crews began dismantling the historic Binghamton ferry on Wednesday, 112 years after the steamboat ferried its first passengers across the Hudson River and a decade after it served its last customers as a floating restaurant. 

Demolition work begins on the historic Binghamton ferryboat in Edgewater on Wednesday.

Removal of the weather-battered and dilapidated vessel, believed to be the last double-ended steam ferry on the river, is expected to take three months, according to Roger Gross, who helps manage the property for this family. 

“It’s a mixed blessing,” he said of the demolition. “It’s been a festering reminder of the past, and to have it gone would be a cleansing thing.” 

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The Binghamton has been moored on the borough’s shoreline since 1975, when Nelson Gross, a former New Jersey assemblyman, repurposed the ferry into the popular restaurant and nightclub Binghamton’s. 

Business boomed until a busboy and two teenage accomplices kidnapped Gross at the restaurant, forced him to withdraw $20,000 from a nearby bank and stabbed him to death in Manhattan in 1997.

The $600,000 cost of the ferry's removal will be shared by the Gross family, a former tenant who tried and failed to revive Binghamton’s a decade ago and a new tenant who plans to install a floating restaurant on the property, said Neil Gross, Nelson Gross's son. 

The planned 915-seat restaurant and catering hall, to be called Binghamton II, will sit atop a 300-by-78-foot barge at the existing location of the ferry and is expected to open by summer 2018. 

Pieces of its predecessor, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, will be displayed at the New Jersey Maritime Museum in Beach Haven, Neil Gross said. The Gross family has donated a bench, a dinghy and a few doors from the ferry to the museum and may try to salvage the steam engine, he said. 

The engine propelled the Binghamton on thousands of trips across the Hudson River between 1905 and 1967, when it ferried an estimated 125 million passengers between New Jersey and Manhattan. 

For Neil Gross, who spent more than 40 years working on the ferry and managed Binghamton’s after his father's death, the demolition was bittersweet. 

Crews will be cutting up the 231-foot-long vessel piece by piece, he said.  

“It’s sweet and sour, bottom line,” Gross said. “We want to get the new tenant in, but we’re also sad. I grew up on that restaurant.” 

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