Many Disabled tourists who visit New York City wonder what other restaurants, attractions, and events will welcome them and reliably fill their itinerary. Ghost Light Access is happy to recommend Circle Line Sightseeing Cruises – Midtown, with an important qualification: wheelchair accessibility varies by departure point, vessel, seating area, and mobility equipment, so passengers should check the accessibility of their particular cruise before booking.
Recently, with my husband and son, I boarded the Circle Line Bronx at Pier 83 for the one-hour Liberty Midtown Cruise down the Hudson River to see the Statue of Liberty close up. Circle Line currently describes Pier 83 as accessible to passengers using electric wheelchairs and scooters because its gangways are wide enough to accommodate them, with the marine team available to assist with safe boarding and disembarkation. By contrast, Circle Line warns that electric wheelchairs and scooters may not be able to board its Liberty Super Express or Statue at Sunset cruises from Pier 16 because of the narrower gangways there.
For this particular family outing, I chose to use my custom manual Motion Composites Veloce wheelchair and was pushed by my spouse. I ordinarily use my custom prescription Permobil M3 Corpus wheelchair for most of my mobility.
As most people with mobility disabilities will tell you, wheelchair accessibility is never adequately described by a single yes-or-no symbol on a tourism website. Someone traveling in a lightweight manual chair, someone being pushed by a companion, someone who trains in the gym and can self-propel, and someone using a large custom power wheelchair can encounter very different physical constraints.
My experience therefore shouldn’t be read as a guarantee that every Circle Line itinerary, vessel or onboard area will work for every Disabled passenger. It won’t. Circle Line itself notes, for example, that its Premier seating is on the second or third levels of its vessels and may not be wheelchair accessible.
For some Disabled visitors, however, Circle Line can be an unusually useful addition to a New York itinerary.
We consider ourselves fortunate, as native Chicagoans, to now quite literally live dangling directly over Pier 83, where Circle Line boards. From here, passengers can see Manhattan, New Jersey, Ellis Island, Liberty Island and New York Harbor, with longer itineraries taking in considerably more of the city. The Liberty Midtown cruise we took lasts about an hour and travels from Pier 83 to within a few hundred feet of the Statue of Liberty before returning to Midtown.
Food and drink are available for sale onboard, and there are restrooms aboard the vessels. Circle Line also offers indoor climate-controlled seating, outdoor viewing areas and live narration.
For someone visiting New York primarily to see Broadway shows, Pier 83’s location is particularly convenient. It sits on the Hudson at West 42nd Street, within the same general Midtown corridor as the Broadway theatre district. A one-hour cruise can therefore occupy part of a theatre day without requiring a separate day trip or an expedition to another part of the city.
As a Disabled New Yorker, I also appreciate being able to recommend attractions based on actually using them. My manual-chair experience won’t translate to every Disabled traveler, and people traveling with larger power chairs or other mobility equipment should confirm the specifications of the exact cruise they intend to take. Circle Line’s published information currently makes Pier 83 the more promising departure point for power-wheelchair and scooter users.
For Disabled visitors whose equipment and access requirements are compatible with their chosen sailing, Circle Line has earned a place among the New York experiences Ghost Light Access is happy to recommend.