By the 1840s and early '50s, New Albany had become the largest city in Indiana and, because of its location just below the Falls of the Ohio and near abundant forests, an important steamboat-building centre (the famous riverboats Robert E. Lee and Eclipse were built there).
The city prospered in the 19th century as a steamboat (river packet) building centre, turning out many paddle wheelers, including the renowned Natchez and J.M. White, but in 1937 it was inundated by river floodwaters.
New Albany's formerly robust industry building steamboats for Southern trade ended in 1870.
The two men decided to share the expense of building a steamboat in Paris using Fulton's design a 66-foot (20-metre) long boat with an eight-horsepower engine of French design and side paddle wheels.
The Banner State was the first steamboat to land materials for building the city in early 1854, before the city was formally founded.
The Oruktor Amphibolos was Evans's lone attempt at building his own steamboat powered by a high-pressure engine and Evans himself was often vague in appraising its capabilities.
The developer, Jackie Kamali, a principal of the Kamali Organization, based in Great Neck, N.Y., also sought enough luxury touches in the $24 million building, which rises like a steamboat from atop the old factory, to set the condo apart from the rest of the housing stock in the neighborhood.
By the early 1960s Evans had built the first of his signature restaurants (red buildings with white trim fashioned in the "Steamboat Gothic" style), which featured home-style meals.
This spring, the three businessmen who bought the place from the Manero family in 2003 plan to start building condominiums on the property, which is on Steamboat Road, near Greenwich Harbor.
But he glimpsed that steamboats were the wave of the future and set about building a fleet of towing paddle-wheelers that by 1900 was the largest of its kind in the United States.
