Up & Down the River: A Sailing History of Hoboken

May 17, 2009

Did you know the America’s Cup yacht race has Hoboken roots? In 1851, an intrepid team from the New York Yacht Club, then based in Hoboken and led by two sons of Hoboken founder Colonel John Stevens, John Cox and Edwin, brought their boat the America across the Atlantic to compete in the British Hundred Guineas Cup. They won the silver cup and decided to dedicate it as the prize for an international challenge race that soon became the premier event in competitive yacht racing.

That historic victory established the Stevens family, and later the engineering school they founded, among the preeminent designers of racing yachts and other ships. Dr. Michael Bruno, Dean of the School of Engineering and Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, will visit the Museum on Sunday, May 17, at 4 p.m. His talk, “A Sailing History of Hoboken” will cover the Stevens family’s and the school’s contributions to sailing design, beginning with the yacht America, through the school’s cutting-edge research into boat design over the past 150 years.