Updated, 4:01 p.m. | The 30-foot cabin cruiser named the E-Z Goin was going pretty hard at the height of Hurricane Sandy, carried by floodwaters over the streets of Broad Channel, Queens, and sent ramming against a corner house.  “I figured it was a matter of time before it just rammed my windows in,” said the owner of the house, Mark Ott, 38, who was inside riding out the storm with his family. Mr. Ott managed to jump into the boat, get its engines started and run it aground near the median of Cross Bay Boulevard, where it has remained for two weeks.  “It’s become a conversation piece,” said Mr. Ott, a bus mechanic for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who spray-painted a new name on the battered boat: S.S. Minnow, after the wayward vessel on the popular television show “Gilligan’s Island.”  “I figured it would lighten people’s moods,” he said while surveying the boat from his front stoop on Monday night. “On the show, it was a three-hour tour, but I was only on board for about five minutes.”  Mr. Ott did not know who owned the boat, adding that it most likely broke free from a local dock or washed in from one of the nearby boatyards.  Another neighbor had scrawled a heartfelt message on the side of the boat directed at the city’s Department of Sanitation, whose members have been hailed as heroes in the neighborhood for their aggressive cleanup. Another neighbor had placed a big plywood sign on the boat saying, “Broad Channel, the Forgotten Town!”  “There have been cops and firemen taking pictures in front of it every day,” said Mr. Ott, who like others here considers the boat a symbol of how, in the days after the storm, little attention was paid to Broad Channel, a working-class neighborhood in the middle of Jamaica Bay whose streets were turned into raging rivers. The waters splintered houses, obliterated docks and tossed dozens of boats into the streets, many of them still untouched.  Photos of the E-Z Goin have been widely seen on social media. It has blocked one of the two northbound lanes of this main route in and out of the storm-ravaged Rockaways. It has caused delays every day, despite the traffic agents stationed there to help move cars along.  On Monday morning, a sticker from the Sanitation Department was put on the boat declaring it “condemned property” that was “scheduled for removal.” But by Monday afternoon, someone had slopped black paint over the sticker.  “Maybe it was the owner, I don’t know,” said Mr. Ott, who then recalled how on the night the storm hit, the boat floated along East 16th Road toward Cross Bay Boulevard. Part of the boat became entangled in utility lines in front of his house.  “The wires were stretching like a rubber band,” said Mr. Ott, who was inside with his wife, their three young children and his mother, 62.  “My mother said, ‘Why don’t you see if you can steer it away from here?’” He threw some tools in a plastic bag and mounted a headlamp on his head. He put on a pair of shorts and waded out through the water and pulled himself over the side of the boat.  “I figured I could hot-wire it,” said Mr. Ott, a third-generation Broad Channel resident who used to work repairing boat engines. He checked its twin inboard engines, turned the battery switch on, and followed the ignition wires, to begin his planned hot-wiring caper.  “Then I realized I didn’t even have to, because the keys were in the ignition,” he said.  Both engines started easily and he gunned the boat until it came to a stop, and he waded back to his house.  On Tuesday afternoon, a photographer for The New York Times was taking photos of the boat when a man who identified himself as Robert Waldheim and said he was the owner showed up. He said he was annoyed that his boat was now better known as the Minnow.  The boat, Mr. Waldheim said, had brought him “many hours of joy.” But, he added, “I’m sick of it and I just want it to go away.” Shortly afterward, contractors who had been hired by the city arrived and started to prepare to move the boat.  The Times’s Stephen Farrell captured the boat on video during last week’s northeaster.
A cabin cruiser along a busy street in Queens has become a reminder of the storm's wrath and the neighborhood's struggle to recover.