By Candace Taylor | Photographs by Nicholas Calcott for WSJ

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Victoria MacKenzie-Childs recently replaced the vintage stove in her kitchen with a new stainless-steel grill.

"I was just ready for a change," explains Victoria, whose shoulder-length hair is dyed rainbow colors and tied up with mismatched ribbons. After all, she says, "we're practically camping anyway."

She and her husband, Richard MacKenzie-Childs, are artists in their 70s who have lived for the past two decades on Yankee, a roughly 150-foot-long ferryboat built in 1907. The founders of the popular home-decor brand MacKenzie-Childs have spent years filling the vessel with their colorful creations, from a gigantic shell wreath to whimsical lamps and vases made with bits of metal found in a nearby junkyard.

Much like the stove, however, the couple's living situation is in need of a change. They are getting older, and so is Yankee, which is increasingly in need of repairs. Docked at an out-of-the-way Staten Island marina, the vessel has been on and off the market for more than a decade and is currently for sale by the owners, asking $1.25 million.

One of the few surviving vessels of its age and type, Yankee is on the National Register of Historic Places. Built to service Maine's Casco Bay islands, the steel-hulled steamer was later moved to New York Harbor, where in the 1920s it ferried immigrants to Ellis Island and then on to New York City. Later the boat carried passengers to the Statue of Liberty for tours, and served as a ferry to Rhode Island's Block Island. The Navy used it for patrols and ferrying troops in Boston Harbor in World War I, and as a ferry to the Philadelphia Navy Yard in World War II.

In the 1980s, Yankee was sold for scrap, but an antique dealer bought it in 1990, towed it to Manhattan's Pier 25 and began restoring it. That's where Victoria and Richard eventually found it, around 2003.

The MacKenzie-Childses have always perceived the world through a unique lens. That's what enabled them, in the 1980s, to parlay their quirky ceramic designs into the MacKenzie-Childs brand, selling checkerboard-patterned tea cups and fish-shaped dinner plates. But they lost the Aurora, N.Y.-based company and rights to the name in a 2001 bankruptcy sale, filing for personal bankruptcy a short time later. The legal proceedings from that time are still a sore spot for Victoria.

When they moved to New York City after losing the company, they couldn't find an affordable place to rent on dry land, so 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.

She declined to say how much they paid for Yankee, but says they quickly fell in love. Since then, 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. They appreciate not having neighbors, other than an ever-changing array of boats docked nearby. "I love the view -- industry and nature," Victoria says. For years they kept chickens on the transom, and Victoria served fresh eggs to their guests.

Yankee has about 10,000 square feet of space spread across four levels. The vessel still has some original details, including tongue-and-groove siding, and from the outside it still looks much as it did carrying passengers to Ellis Island. On the passenger deck, a promenade with a 4-foot overhang has its original oak benches.

The inside spaces, however, feel like a Steampunk fever dream. Swinging rope chairs hang from the rafters. Dining tables can be raised and lowered by pulley; Victoria is an avowed lover of pulleys. In the wheelhouse on the top deck, a bed is wedged between windows and the ship's wheel.

"Everything is meant to shock us into being ourselves and have fun," Victoria explains.

Below decks in the wood-paneled salon, every possible color, pattern and texture is represented. One wall is bright yellow and another is salmon-colored. A striped carpet is topped with a rug in a brightly colored geometric pattern. Fringed lampshades designed by Victoria have flowers on the outside and colorful swirls on the inside. Black-and-white striped columns intersect with ceiling beams covered in floral wallpaper. "We call those our rosewood beams," says Victoria, though they are made of steel. On the coffee table, an alarmingly lifelike plastic crab starts to move.

On Yankee, "every corner I look at, anywhere I look, I just feel inspired," she says, seated in a spindly, bright yellow chair in the salon.

Victoria and Richard met in the ceramics department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she was teaching and he was a student. They were married a few months later, but Victoria can't say for sure what year that was. "I don't keep track of time and dates," she says with a laugh. "Just recently, someone said, 'What year was Heather born in?' Our daughter. And I said, 'How would I know?'"

Yankee is challenging to maintain, both physically and financially. For example, "we aren't big welders," Victoria notes. "We don't have that kind of equipment or that kind of money." They're getting older, and their health is declining. At low tide, when the boat sits about 6 feet below the level of the dock, getting onto dry land requires mounting a wobbly step stool to reach the gangplank.

To help pay for the boat's upkeep, they previously operated it as a bed-and-breakfast, and in 2021 Victoria set up a Patreon account requesting monetary contributions to assist with the cost of dockage, electricity and insurance, among other expenses. A friend gave them the new grill, along with a small Emeril Lagasse countertop oven, which Victoria used to bake a Kentucky transparent pie on a recent afternoon. Bustling around the tiny kitchen, or galley, she placed sugared cranberries on each slice. It is difficult to walk around the room without bumping into the massive grill, which had to be disassembled to fit into the space.

The March day was chilly, and Yankee was unheated. To save money on fuel, the MacKenzie-Childses had already turned off the furnace for the season. To stave off the cold, Victoria was bundled up in an old-fashioned ankle-length coat with wide lapels, her signature locks topped with a beret.

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." In 2013 they sold the Evermore estate, their former home in New York's Cayuga County, for $595,000, according to public records. They had listed it in 2011 for $ 1.1 million.

The MacKenzie-Childses hope a deep-pocketed buyer will see Yankee as a work of art and a piece of history worth preserving. "This is a boat that's not like any other boat," says Gregor Collins, a family friend who is helping them market the vessel. "We want to attract kind of a creative buyer." He sees it becoming a floating restaurant, coffeehouse or tourist attraction.

"Can you imagine dining on Yankee if a restaurant owner purchased it?" says real-estate agent Michael DeRosa of Michael DeRosa Exchange, who listed Yankee in 2018 for $2.37 million with Franklin Ruttan. A number of potential buyers were interested in the vessel, DeRosa says, but the MacKenzie-Childses weren't quite ready to let it go.

Ferries have a bewitching effect on potential buyers, says historian David Moskowitz. "Many of them have this really beautiful, iconic architecture," he says. "They bring us back to a time in the past, like baseball cards or old comic books."

In 2022, "Saturday Night Live" stars Colin Jost and Pete Davidson, along with a group of investors, bought a decommissioned Staten Island ferry at auction for $280,100. They are planning to convert it into an entertainment destination with bars, a hotel and a theater at a cost of about $34 million.

Converting a ferry to new uses has proven to be a tall order.

In the 1970s, a New Jersey businessman purchased the Mary Murray with plans to turn it into a restaurant. The plan failed, and it sat unused for years on the Raritan River, slowly being disassembled for scrap. "It was sort of sitting, wasting away," says Moskowitz, who has written about the Mary Murray. In the 1960s, unrealized plans for the Knickerbocker ferry included a mall, movie theater and cocktail lounges. The Miss New York was briefly a Connecticut restaurant, but the business failed and it sank after hitting an ice floe in the Hudson River.

Repurposing an aging ferry can be prohibitively expensive, Moskowitz says. In addition to the normal costs of restoring a historic structure, "it's got to be something that floats and doesn't leak."

Then there is the challenge of finding somewhere to put it. Especially in the Northeast, dock space is limited and expensive. At the mostly industrial Staten Island marina, it costs about $3,900 a month to dock Yankee.

Despite the MacKenzie-Childses' devotion, Yankee is in disrepair, with peeling paint and rotting wood. The vessel hasn't been seaworthy since they bought it, so they have used tugboats to move it several times within the New York area when they have had to find new places to dock.

An ideal buyer might be an "eccentric, creative billionaire," Collins says.

One idea Collins had is the couple's former business, MacKenzie-Childs, which is currently owned by the private-equity firm EagleTree Capital. When Collins reached out to MacKenzie-Childs to ask if the company might want to buy Yankee, however, "they never got back to me," he says.

But a spokeswoman for EagleTree told the Journal that it's not something MacKenzie-Childs would consider.

Write to Candace Taylor at candace.taylor@wsj.com

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April 24, 2025 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

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