It’s the end of an era for Brooklyn’s Bargemusic
The floating music hall begins "Chapter 2."
Bargemusic at Fulton Ferry Landing before its final sail on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. Photo: Mary Frost, Brooklyn Eagle
“Time and tide wait for no man”
— ancient saying
FULTON FERRY LANDING — The “barge” part of Bargemusic — Brooklyn’s iconic floating concert hall — is no more.
On Monday, the rusting 19th-century barge was towed from its slip at Fulton Ferry Landing near the Brooklyn Bridge, to meet its end at a shipyard in Staten Island.
More than 5,000 concerts — mostly classical, with American contemporary and jazz mixed in — had been performed inside the cozy, wood-paneled hall with its red-brick fireplace, delighting music lovers and launching musical careers since 1977, well before Brooklyn Bridge Park took over the nearby wharves and warehouses. The venue had been described as perfect for chamber music by music critics.
But the music will play on, Bargemusic’s board of directors said. Until a new boat can be found, Brooklyn Bridge Park has “generously provided a wonderful space with gorgeous views,” board member and singer/composer DeBorge Pinnington told the Brooklyn Eagle. “We’re very grateful.”
Concerts will be held in the park’s Boathouse — a space roughly the size of the barge with the same gorgeous views of the East River and Manhattan skyline.
“We’re calling it Bargemusic’s Chapter 2. Our biggest donors and foundations are extremely excited,” Pinnington said. “They know that finding the right boat takes time, and it’s important to continue the concerts. After all, the most important thing is the performances.”
While Bargemusic has always opened its doors to people who can’t afford a ticket, they’re hoping to offer concerts in the Boathouse admission-free, at least initially, she said. With backing from foundations, the free concerts could become permanent.
A bittersweet moment
The boat couldn’t be salvaged, Bargemusic’s Artistic Director Mark Peskanov told the Brooklyn Eagle.
Peskanov, an acclaimed violinist, has performed on the barge since 1981 and took over the helm from Bargemusic’s indomitable founder Olga Bloom as her chosen successor in 2008.
“There was no path to remain a floating concert hall,” he said. “Marine experts told me we would be much more likely to become a submarine. Salt water destroys everything and finally it destroyed the hull, and even if you put millions of dollars into it, you could never restore it properly. You don’t want to let it go, but this is public safety.”
“The boat has definitely had its life,” Pinnington said. “We maintained the barge diligently for years using the best companies,” she said, describing marine experts patching the interior of the hull with foam and marine epoxy, and water pumps in operation inside the bilge. Streaks of rust, harmless but unsightly, appeared on the outside of the barge, caused by the constant operation of pumps.
“Finally, the experts said we could not restore it to the level required,” Pinnington said. “They said you’d have to put more than a million dollars into it and still there would be no guarantee.”
A marine crew with a giant crane labored all day Monday disconnecting Bargemusic from gangplanks and pilings, and getting the vessel patched up just enough to survive the trip to the shipyard.
“It’s a bittersweet moment,” Peskanov said as he watched tugboats pull the barge out into the East River. He walked onto a waterfront path, following alongside the barge as it traveled south. “Look at it, headed into the sun,” he said, wiping his eyes. “It’s beautiful.”
‘Olga would have understood’
It was Olga Bloom’s vision in the 1970s to convert the 19th-century coffee barge into a floating concert hall. In her late 50s and with a career as a concert violinist and violist behind her, she scavenged cherrywood panels from an old Staten Island Ferry and worked with a handful of volunteers, including her niece, to build benches, shelves and a brick fireplace, scrape rust, do welding and put together the performance space. She parked her blue Volkswagen, filled with lumber, at the foot of Old Fulton Street, a desolate area with plenty of parking.
Olga filled the front deck with plants and flowers, and cultivated a garden on what was at that time vacant land next to the barge. She had studied with a Zen master in her youth, and she placed a large statue of the Buddha on the center of the fireplace mantle.
“I’ve been involved 30 years, and I’m just now starting to understand really what Bargemusic is,” Peskanov said. “Olga brought this barge to a very beautiful place, and opened it to the neighborhood and the community at large. I’m very grateful for the energy and love and generosity everyone brought. Bargemusic is not just the boat, Bargemusic is like the love glue of the neighborhood.”
Peskanov thinks that Olga would have rolled with the flow. “In a way, we are in communication. She would have felt okay. Olga used to say it’s like a mandala — a beautiful painting on the sand. Then it washes away.”
He dreams of a bigger and better boat for the next iteration of Bargemusic. “When you find it, it has to be so right. It has to be more modern, with dressing rooms and other things for the people to enjoy their time. We want to have great architects, great experts, people from the neighborhood, people with passion for boats, great affection for what this could be. We want to preserve the beautiful legacy of the barge.”
‘Could use a paint job’
Before Brooklyn Bridge Park existed, Bargemusic had a license agreement with the city for the use of its slip through the Economic Development Corp. Around 2018, EDC transferred management of Fulton Ferry Landing to the park.
“Bargemusic had a 15-year license agreement with EDC and we inherited that license agreement and in effect became, for lack of a better term, the landlord for Bargemusic,” Eric Landau, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, told the Eagle.
The park had noticed the rust building up on the barge’s exterior and wanted to help out. “This year in our capital budget we allocated funding from the park’s reserve funds to paint Bargemusic,” Landau said.
“We took a look at it and said, ‘Wow, it really looks like it could use a paint job,’ and painting the barge is a significant expense — six figures. So we went to the folks at Bargemusic last month and said, ‘Hey, we put this money aside to paint the barge and [the structure] on top, and we’d love to coordinate that with you.’ And that’s when they said to us, ‘Paint the barge? We’ve got to get rid of the barge because there’s a massive hole in the hull, it’s taking up water and it’s not usable anymore. We’ve got to figure out a way to get rid of it.’”
Brooklyn Bridge Park sent a diver into the water to check the hull’s condition, and the diver confirmed the vessel wasn’t seaworthy enough to tow away, Landau said. So the park footed the bill for the patch work and also the cost of towing the boat to the shipyard. “An order of magnitude of $50,000 or so.”
“And then the conversation we had with Bargemusic was, ‘What are you guys going to do now? Bargemusic is an institution in this neighborhood and this community. Without the barge there, what’s the plan?’ And they said to us, ‘Well, we’ve got to figure that out. We’ve got to do significant fundraising to get another barge.’”
The park would “really love to see something continue in the interim,” Landau said he told the Bargemusic team, and the park offered the organization the Boathouse, located near the Pier 4 beach at the intersection of Furman and lower Montague streets.
The ground floor is a storage space for small, non-motorized boats like kayaks and canoes. But the upper floor has served various purposes, including as a meeting space for community organizations and a park visitor center in the summer. “It’s a nice big space, and it’s got an incredible view of the water and the Manhattan skyline,” Landau said. There are also restrooms conveniently located right outside the performance space.
Some of Bargemusic’s board members and musicians have already checked out the space and are thrilled, Pinnington said. “They can’t wait to come. They like the intimate size and the acoustics.”
Progress, Hurricane Sandy and time
Bargemusic — and the upscale River Cafe restaurant next door owned by Michael “Buzzy” O’Keeffe, which is also resting partially on a converted coffee barge — helped spark the development of the formerly gritty area. The transformation was complete with the development of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
While age is the major cause of the barge’s demise, the progress it helped bring about may have played a small part. Progress brought more ferries and their wake. A ferry dock, for ten years, blocked the barge from traveling to dry dock for maintenance.
But in the end, time and nature itself, in the form of salt water, East River tides and increasingly powerful storms, conspired against the barge. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the build-up of sand and silt in the slip caused the boat to scrape bottom every time it rocked.
“All I can think about is how many people gave of themselves to make Bargemusic beautiful — musicians, performers and the audience, this incredible energy they create together,” Peskanov said. “Olga would say it’s a bouillabaisse. She said we all keep this mission alive.”
“Do you remember when it was just all warehouses, when it was just us and the River Café?” he said. “Look now! It’s more than the view, it’s the energy, the feel of this that we bring to the Boathouse and Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was meant to be that we can continue.”
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