If you ride the Canal Street ferry into Algiers Point on a random Tuesday, you board at a bare landing. No shelter over the ramp. No restrooms. No building at all, really, just a platform and a line of people waiting for a boat that has crossed this stretch of the Mississippi since 1827. That boat has kept running through five years of a terminal building sitting locked and empty, through a demolition crew tearing down its bones this spring, and through more than one public budget number that quietly doubled along the way.
The building is the story people expect. The fact that the neighborhood never actually needed it to keep functioning is the one they don't.
What actually closed, and what didn't
The confusion is worth clearing up first, because most coverage blurs the two. The ferry service, the boat itself, never stopped. What closed was the terminal structure at 138 Morgan Street, the building with the roof, the restrooms, the indoor waiting area. According to Verite News, that building has sat closed since 2019, and the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority spent 2024 running community engagement sessions to design its replacement.
The scope, per the architecture firm Studio West, which holds the design contract, centers on a new accessible ramp, an elevator, and a set of site improvements to the 16,600-square-foot facility. Two requests came up repeatedly at those 2024 meetings: a covered ramp so riders aren't standing in rain, and public restrooms, which residents ranked as their second-highest priority. Both had been missing for years by the time anyone asked.
Longtime Algiers Point resident and neighborhood association board member Jim Goodwin remembered what the building used to mean before it became a construction zone, recalling a time when the terminal was where neighbors gathered before crossing together.
"So people would rendezvous here and then go together across the river."
That kind of informal meeting spot disappeared with the building. The crossing itself never did.
The budget that kept growing
Here's where the public numbers stop agreeing with each other, and the disagreement itself tells you something. In November 2024, Verite News and WWNO both reported the renovation as a $9.7 million project, a figure that matches Studio West's own project page, which lists a $9,700,000 budget and an estimated 2026 completion.
By late March 2026, when the RTA began demolishing the old structure, local coverage from Fox 8 and WGNO described the same renovation as an $11 million to $11.4 million project. That's not a rounding difference. That's the budget growing by roughly 15 to 20 percent in the space of a year and a half.
The most recent public accounting, reflected in the ferry's Wikipedia entry and sourced to a December 2025 NOLA.com report, puts the total project cost at $26 million, funded primarily through about $23 million in Federal Transit Administration grants with roughly $2 million in local matching funds from the RTA. That figure covers a noticeably larger scope than the original ramp-and-elevator retrofit: a covered passenger boarding ramp, new administrative offices, public restrooms, new landing barges, and a community plaza built with space for events, dining, and retail.
Read those three numbers in order, $9.7 million, $11.4 million, $26 million, and the honest interpretation isn't that costs spiraled out of control. It's that the project itself changed shape, from a basic accessibility fix into what the RTA now describes as a multimodal community hub. Whether that reclassification happened because the original scope was underscoped from the start, or because the agency expanded its ambitions once the federal grant money was secured, isn't something the public record settles cleanly. Both readings are available in the reporting, and residents deserve to know the number moved for real reasons, not just louder ones.
The timeline slipped by about a year
The RTA's original target, stated in that November 2024 community meeting, was a March 2026 reopening. Construction on that scale doesn't start itself, though, and per the December 2025 NOLA.com reporting cited in the ferry's most recent public sourcing, actual work on the terminal didn't begin until December 2025, more than a year after the community engagement process wrapped.
Then, during the last week of March 2026, the RTA suspended ferry service outright for a demolition and reconstruction phase. Fox 8 reported the closure ran from March 30 through that Friday night, with WGNO adding that the agency's own officials flagged the schedule as subject to change given the water-based construction and equipment transport involved. Riders were directed to the 103 General Meyer bus route as the substitute, a bus that runs every 40 minutes, compared to a ferry that normally departs every half hour.
The most current completion estimate, per that same recent sourcing, is early 2027. Compare that to the original March 2026 promise and the project has slipped by roughly ten months. Compare it to the building's 2019 closure date and the terminal, once it finally reopens, will have sat dark for close to eight years.
None of that changed whether you could get to the east bank on a given morning. It changed whether you had a bathroom or a dry place to stand while you waited.
What crossing the river actually looks like right now
The standard ferry schedule, per NORTA, has departures from Algiers Point on the hour and half hour beginning at 6 a.m., with departures from Canal Street at a quarter till and a quarter after each hour. The last boat leaves Canal Street at 8:45 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10:45 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Adult fare is $2, with discounted rates for youth, senior, and disabled riders.
That schedule holds on a normal week. It doesn't hold during announced construction windows like the one at the end of March 2026, so a few practical habits are worth building into your routine while the project finishes out its final stretch:
- Check the RTA's service alerts before a crossing if you know a construction phase is active, since the agency has said the timeline for water-based work is subject to change on short notice.
- If the ferry is suspended, plan for the 103 General Meyer bus on a 40-minute frequency rather than the ferry's usual 30-minute cadence, and build the difference into your schedule.
- Expect no restrooms or covered waiting area at the Algiers Point landing until the renovated terminal actually reopens, whenever that lands relative to the current early 2027 estimate.
The neighborhood that never waited on the building
What's easy to miss in all of this is how little the missing terminal actually changed about daily life on this side of the river. Confetti Park still sits between two of the neighborhood's steadiest anchors, Drift Inn Diner on one side with its homemade sodas and soft serve, and Barracuda on the other, a taco spot built into a refurbished Gulf gas station with string lights and covered picnic tables. Bargeboard, the antique and home goods shop a short walk from the landing, still pulls people in for what's supposed to be a five-minute browse and turns into an hour. Congregation Coffee's original café on Pelican Avenue, the flagship location that predates the company's newer spots elsewhere in the city, is still where a lot of Algiers Point mornings start.
Walk the levee past the landing and you'll still pass the Robert E. Nims Jazz Walk of Fame, the string of plaques honoring the city's jazz legends that runs from the Louis Armstrong statue near the ferry landing, maintained in partnership with the Algiers Point neighborhood association. None of that required a functioning terminal building to keep working. It's why a crossing point that's technically been without its building for the better part of a decade hasn't actually disrupted the rhythm of the neighborhood around it.
The terminal will reopen eventually, probably sometime in early 2027 if the current estimate holds, with a covered ramp, working restrooms, and a plaza built for the kind of informal gathering Jim Goodwin remembers from before 2019. Until then, the boat keeps running on schedule, the bus fills in when it has to, and the businesses that actually define a Tuesday in Algiers Point never depended on the building to begin with.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home on this side of the river, whether it's a question about the crossing itself or about how a neighborhood this steady tends to hold its value, The Martzolf Group knows Algiers Point block by block and is glad to talk it through.
