The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a New York couple who’ve been living in a 197-year-old ferryboat for two decades.
Victoria and Richard MacKenzie-Childs are artists in their 70s and founders of the home-decor brand MacKenzie-Childs. When they moved to New York City from Aurora, NY, Victoria set out on rollerblades to look for space on a boat. “I skated all the way around the island, stopping at every pier,” she says.
That’s when she found the Yankee, which had been bought by an antique dealer in 1990, and towed it to Manhattan’s Pier 25.
“Since then,” reports the Journal, “they have poured nearly all of their resources into maintaining the vessel, decorating it in their eclectic style and filling it with the ephemera they have made and collected.”
To help pay for the boat’s upkeep, they operated it as a bed-and-breakfast for a time. Now they hope to sell it to a deep-pocketed buyer who “will see Yankee as a work of art and a piece of history worth preserving.”
When and if they sell the boat, Victoria says she would like to sell their possessions and live in a Tesla Cybertruck. “Wouldn’t that be fun? You can wake up to any view you want.”