566 HISTORY OF BROOKLYN.

Taking into account that the travel is greater at certain times than it others, it is still believed that the bridge can furnish transportation for forty millions of people per annum, and this is the number that now travel across the various ferries of the Union Ferry Company.

Before the bridge is built the traffic between the two cities will have doubled, so that if the ferries retained all their present custom, there will fall to the bridge a patronage equal to that now received by the ferry companies.

We next come to

THE FERRIES OF WILLIAMSBURGH.

Williamsburgh, like Brooklyn, was so situated, that its growth and prosperity mainly depended upon its connection and means of intercourse with the city of New York. The history of its ferries, therefore, although perhaps not so interesting as that of Brooklyn, is yet of sufficient consequence to demand a passing notice. The water front of Williamsburgh and Bushwick being located entirely outside of the limits pretentiously claimed by the city of New York, there has been none of that tedious and expensive litigation which has so overshadowed the adjacent city of Brooklyn; and the ferry abuses of which Williamsburgh has had to complain have been the results of private cupidity and monopolies, rather than of corporate injustice and gigantic legalized frauds. Perhaps Williamsburgh may thank the slow and gradual increase of population on her side of the river, and the Small amount of business transacted between her shores and New York, for the immunity which she has enjoyed from her metropolitan neighbor’s avariciousness; for, had she developed in her earlier years the same elements of prosperity that Brooklyn did, she would soon have attracted the same covetous eye, and unscrupulous grasp to her water-rights. In the total absence of any of those neighborly claims which forbade the citizens of Brooklyn from crossing the river in their own boats—the people of Bushwick freely exercised their own wills and convenience in the matter of rowing themselves, their neighbors and their garden-truck over to the city—so that we do not hear of any very regular ferry until near the close of the last century.

THE GRAND STREET FERRY.

About the year 1797, Mr. James Hazard, who resided at the foot of Grand street, New York, established a regular row boat ferry from that point to what is now the foot of Grand street, Williamsburgh. At this time, it may be remarked, the houses on the New York side, in the vicinity