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Audio Slide Show

Sailing New York City

Photographs by Ben Zucker

Introduction by Siobhan Bohnacker

This week’s Journeys Issue of the magazine got the photo department thinking about all the strange ways in which people travel around New York. Ben Zucker, a photographer from upstate New York and avid sailor since childhood, moors a small sailboat at the City Island docks, in the Bronx, which he takes out regularly, preferring to explore the five boroughs by way of its many waterways. Recently, we sat down to talk about his experiences with urban sailing. “When I first moved to New York, I was living in a pretty dismal apartment,” he told me. He thought buying a boat might be a way to escape the confines of the city, and added that the undertaking had turned out to be more practically and financially viable than he’d expected. “Many think of sailing as an expensive endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of old sailboats out there, expensive forty or fifty years ago, that can be had for less than a used car.”

Zucker describes the City Island docks, a fifteen-minute drive from his apartment, in Harlem, as “a strange mixture of outer-borough New York and New England coast. There are fancy and seedy seafood restaurants, yacht clubs and crusty boatyards.” This will be Zucker’s fourth summer of sailing around New York. Setting off from the Bronx in a small boat, he told me, is “an amazing escape from city life. So quickly, you transition from a loud, dense, and urban landscape to open water. From there, you can head east, and out onto the Sound, with Connecticut to your north and Long Island to your south. Or from City Island you can head west, into the East River, and get an unfamiliar perspective on Manhattan as you head south. As you dodge all the working boats and ferries chugging through the harbor, you make your way out to the Verrazano Bridge and your first view of the open Atlantic.”

We asked Zucker to document a single day of sailing around New York City. Aboard the Noesis, a friend’s full keel sloop, Zucker departed from the docks at dawn. Below are some of his photographs and audio from the trip.