Ferries from Midtown / W. 39th St.

The glass columns inside this terminal are not architecture for its own sake. They are the ventilation towers of the Lincoln Tunnel, built in the 1930s, and the building was designed around them because there was no moving them. Pier 79 is a ferry terminal fitted into infrastructure that was already there — which is roughly how it functions too.

The basics

• Address: Pier 79, 459 12th Avenue, beside the West Side Highway at West 39th Street, inside Hudson River Park.
• Opened: 3 December 1986, with the start of NY Waterway commuter service.
• Ownership: the building belongs to the City of New York, which paid for it; NY Waterway operates it under lease.
• Berths: seven slips, six in regular use.
• Traffic: 2,835,498 passengers in 2025.

⚠ There is no parking, and that is deliberate

You cannot leave a car here. What the terminal has instead is a free bus fleet running connecting services across Manhattan below 59th Street, at peak and off-peak, reaching the avenues around 57th, 50th, 42nd and 34th Streets and continuing downtown.

That bus network is the actual product. A ten-minute crossing from New Jersey is worthless if it lands you on 12th Avenue with a twenty-minute walk ahead; the shuttles are what make the terminal usable, and they are included in the fare rather than sold separately.

Three operators, and our timetable holds one

Pier 79 is shared. NY Waterway runs the New Jersey network from here; NYC Ferry uses it for the St. George route to Staten Island; Seastreak runs to Belford.

Our schedule data currently covers the NY Waterway services only, so the route list below is the New Jersey side of the building rather than everything that ties up at it.

Where the boats go

Fourteen routes in our data, and the weight sits on a handful:

• Port Imperial / Weehawken — 66 sailings out and 65 back, about 10 minutes. The core service.
• Hoboken 14th St. — 63 sailings inbound against 20 outbound.
• Lincoln Harbor — 45 outbound against 18 in.
• Paulus Hook, Edgewater, Hoboken / NJ Transit and Brookfield Place — a handful each.

⚠ Those lopsided numbers are a routing pattern, not an error

Hoboken 14th Street sends three times as many sailings here as it receives, and Lincoln Harbor receives two and a half times as many as it sends. Commuter ferries on this river are frequently scheduled directionally, with a boat arriving from one landing and departing to another rather than shuttling back and forth.

The practical consequence: check the return leg separately. The service that brought you across may not be the service that takes you back, and on the thinner landings the last departure can be much earlier than the last arrival.

Getting here and getting on

The terminal sits on the far west side, which is its one real drawback — the nearest subway is a walk away, and the free shuttles exist partly to solve that. Tickets come from machines, the window or the operator's app; there is no reservation and no assigned seating.

Its New Jersey counterpart is Port Imperial, and between the two of them they carry most of what crosses this stretch of the Hudson.