When Victoria MacKenzie-Childs died earlier this month, collectors celebrated the rainbow-haired ceramicist and the homewares brand she created with her husband, Richard. She was also mourned by the city’s boating community, who praised the decades she spent as the caretaker of a decommissioned steamship that served as their live-work studio. (“Certainly had love and pride for owning the YANKEE and all of the maintenance needed for a vessel that size,” reads one remembrance on the Block Island Ferry Memories Facebook group.) That ship, in fact, is still for sale today.
Victoria and Richard bought the Yankee in 2001, not long after losing their namesake brand in bankruptcy proceedings. The couple needed studio space (they eventually started another company in 2004), but, apparently, Manhattan was largely out of reach on their budget. And so they looked to the “fringes” of the island, as MacKenzie-Childs put it in an interview last year. She roller-skated from pier to pier to see if anyone would consider selling before ultimately landing on the Yankee, a 10,000-square-foot vessel built in 1907 that, in a previous life, had shuttled immigrants to Ellis Island and troops in the world wars. Its owner had seemed like he was in a hurry to sell. The boat was “really falling apart” at the time, says the couple’s daughter Heather Chaplet. “The second deck was gone.”
