the grand old days of rail & ferry may be over, especially in the united states - but this place still has magic about it. men with their pipes and the new york times on the seven o'clock, women with their youngsters in tow on the ten o'clock - gone are the days of romantic rail travel. and those gorgeous old ferries with their wooden decks and wooden ramps. and to think that there are men and women who stepped off the train here and walked the same platform, the same corridor and down the same couple of steps, out on the same dock and onto the same ferry bound for manhattan for years - thirty and forty years - and now they are but ghosts of history, as are the trains and ferries that carried them. but the terminus still stands, as do the docks - left as they last were. manhattan has grown across the hudson river. the stories these docks have seen still exist, even if we may never hear them.
