A cast-bronze monument for the victims of the sinking of a steam ferry recently appeared in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, near other somber memorials to soldiers, sailors and mariners lost at sea or on the battlefield.



There was, however, no such ferry disaster. The artist behind the memorial, Joseph Reginella, made the whole thing up.

The 250lb monument, which depicts a Staten Island ferry, the Cornelius G Kolff, being dragged under the waves by a giant octopus, is part of a multi-layered hoax that includes a sophisticated website, a documentary, fabricated newspaper articles and glossy fliers directing tourists to a phantom Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum, across the harbor.

The project took six months to build. Reginella said the idea came to him while he was taking his 11-year-old nephew from Florida on the ferry between Manhattan and Staten Island.

“He was asking me all kinds of crazy questions, like if the waters were shark-infested,” he said. “I said ‘No, but you know what did happen in the 60s? One of these boats got pulled down by a giant octopus.”

“The story just rolled off the top of my head,” he said, and it evolved to become “a multimedia art project and social experience – not maliciously – about how gullible people are”.

Reginella, who usually creates artworks for store windows and amusement parks, said his ferry monument never stayed in one spot for more than two days “because the city will come and take it away”. It takes two people to break the piece down and move it.

“It’s definitely an experience when you see people who don’t know about it,” Reginella said. “They get this strange look on their face, they stare out at the water and walk away. I sit close by with a fishing pole and fish. I eavesdrop on the conversations.”

Sometimes, he said, when he overhears people saying, “How come nobody has ever heard of this?” he’ll interject, offering that the disaster happened on 22 November 1963, a day when the news was dominated by the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

“It creates a plausibility for them,” he said, “and they shake their head, ‘Maybe.’”

‘The Staten Island Ferry Disaster’.

Puzzled tourists looking for the memorial museum on Staten Island and its supposed collection of wreckage with “strange suction-cup-shaped marks” sometimes wander into the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, asking for directions. Staff at the nearby Staten Island Museum admit they too were puzzled at first.

“We kind of scratched our heads and said we don’t know where it is and started looking further into it, and realized it was a hoax,” said a spokeswoman, Rachel Somma.

“Most people have the feeling that it’s not a reality. It’s a treasure hunt for them. It’s fun. That’s what we love about it ... It’s great that it gets people out here.”

Melanie Giuliano, who produced a mock documentary for Reginella’s website, used her father in the role of a maritime expert and a neighbor as an eyewitness. A colleague of Reginella’s wife served as the narrator.

“I thought it was an insane idea but I thought it was hilarious,” said Giuliano.

One thing about the preposterous story is real. There really was a Cornelius G Kolff ferry, which carried passengers for 36 years before becoming a floating dorm for inmates at the Rikers Island prison. It was sold for scrap in 2003.