In this illustrated history, Matteson, a twenty-year tugboat veteran, narrates two centuries of the city's history from the decks of its tugboats, whose fortunes "powered up with the rising tide of the nineteenth century and then powered back down with the efficiencies of the twentieth." The first boat in New York meant exclusively for towing entered service in 1828, but business was sporadic; her captain was "more likely to be found in the local saloon than at the helm." In 1871, a tugboat was lured up the Hudson to Sing Sing and shanghaied by escaped Tammany men, then chased by a flotilla of guards in rowboats, who finally ran it aground near Nyack. The peak of the tugboat era was 1929, when eight hundred of them plied the city's waters. Today, there are fewer than two hundred, which are used to dock larger ships, though a handful, Matteson notes elegiacally, still "trundle back and forth across the harbor on an indifferent schedule, carrying mostly Long Island garbage and incinerator ash to the mainland."