The ferry service offered by Brooklyn’s new IKEA to and from lower Manhattan is so red hot that the Swedish home-furniture giant this week quietly began hand-stamping customers to ensure they get first crack at the free boat rides.
The move has Red Hook residents fuming, some telling the Post yesterday they were denied service or forced to miss rides to Manhattan’s Pier 11 because they didn’t shop in the new superstore, which opened on the Brooklyn waterfront last month.
To get city approval to open its first Big Apple store, IKEA agreed to fund the service and even offer it to non-customers to help ease the burden of extra traffic the store would bring.
But resident Brian Sietz said his daughter was “harassed” and stopped from getting on the ferry in Red Hook because she was not stamped and that three of his neighbors “had similar accounts.”
IKEA spokesman Joseph Roth said the free service is “still open to everyone” — provided there is room on board. The general public, he said, can board if there’s still room after the customers get on.
He also said “you don’t have to buy anything to be stamped.”
IKEA was supposed to use just one vessel operated by New York Water Taxi, but Roth said it is now using up to two or three at a time on peak weekend hours because the demand is so high.
New York Water Taxi President Tom Fox said an average of about 15,000 people have used the service each week since the June 18 opening – well above what was expected.
The water taxis dock along a 6.5-acre public esplanade that IKEA built behind the store to also help garner elected officials’ support for the controversial $100 million project.
In related news, Fox confirmed that ferry service to Governors Island from Red Hook is officially dead this summer because city and state officials opted not to fund it. The water taxi service was widely popular after beginning last summer. It took off from Red Hook from behind the nearby Fairway market off Van Brunt Street.
But money is apparently there for Manhattanites. Free service to Governors Island from Pier 11 in Manhattan, which also started last summer, is still being subsidized to go along with the longtime service out of Battery Marine Terminal in Manhattan.
Craig Hammerman, district manager of Brooklyn Community Board 6, said the board “continues to lobby” for the return of the free service in Red Hook, especially since Brooklyn is closer to Governors Island than Manhattan. He also said Red Hook and “the foot of Atlantic Avenue” in Brooklyn Heights warrant “continuous ferry service and should become part of a New York Harbor loop.”
Red Hook also recently had water taxi service running to Manhattan from behind the Fairway market that opened in 2006, but it was short lived because of lack of riders.