Ed Bacon and his wife, Regina Jordan, live on a ketch at the 79th Street Boat Basin in Manhattan. Mr. Bacon has lived at the boat basin since 1970.

By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

Leslie Day flirted, dated, married, raised a family and found her life’s work in Manhattan - or rather, just off its shore. Born on the Upper West Side, she moved to a 10-meter houseboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin when she was 30, single and a masseuse. She found her future husband, a biologist, on the 13-meter houseboat next door.
After they were wed, they traded up to a 17-meter houseboat, and they raised a son. Now, with their son on his own, the couple live on a 17-meter cruiser. Dr. Day, 62, who is now an elementary school teacher, recently wrote “Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City.”
Since 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, the 79th Street Boat Basin has been an object of fascination off the island of Manhattan, part fishing village, part Monte Carlo and all floating opera all of the time.
The boat basin floats on five main docks on the banks of the Hudson River. For decades, there have been as many as 100 pleasure craft, some pristine, others slovenly - schooners, houseboats, yachts and trawlers - tethered just off the Riverside Park promenade.
Critics have called the residents squatters on public property; even the city government, which owns the docks, has not always been comfortable with the arrangement. But the boaters call themselves a community with rights like any other.
Residents have ranged from millionaires to those between jobs.
“Over the years,” said Ed Bacon, 67, a yacht broker and the resident of longest standing at more than 37 years, “we’ve had starving artists, Wall Street financiers, rock promoters, computer programmers, United Nations employees and,” pausing to laugh, “Dick DeBartolo.” He is a senior writer at Mad, the humor magazine, who maintains a boat as an office.
Mr. Bacon would not have it any other way.
Living among people like himself, he said, would be like “reading from only one page of a book.”
What the boat basin has not had for a while is newcomers, though that is beginning to change.
Keith Kerman, the chief of operations for the Parks Department, said the agency stopped issuing permits for year-round dockage in 1994 in an effort to gradually reduce the population of full-timers, who once occupied nearly all of the 116 permanent slips. After years of clashes with the remaining residents, the two sides reached a compromise: The department would issue a small number of new annual permits .
A permit to dock a boat is one of the last real estate bargains in Manhattan, costing a fraction of even a tiny Upper West Side apartment rental. A typical 9-meter boat costs about $5,880 in annual dock fees, or $490 a month.
Last year, when the Parks Department began issuing new annual permits, the first two boaters began moving in.
Sim Cass, 51, a baker and a former sailor in the British merchant navy, is one of them. He said that he fell in love with the boat basin at first sight, in 1983. “You can see the horizon and the sun and the arc of the moon,” he said, “and yet you are decidedly in Manhattan.”
Mr. Cass, who now lives downtown in an apartment in the East Village, first applied for a year-round permit seven years ago and was finally issued one last October. He plans to move in this summer and live on his 11-meter trawler, which is already docked there. “I’d love to live there now,” he said recently, noting that he is waiting for his daughter to leave for college. “Wintertime is spectacular!”