INTERVIEW: South Street Seaport Museum preserves NYC maritime history
Photo: South Street Seaport Museum’s newest exhibit is called Maritime City. Photo courtesy of Richard Bowditch / Provided by Michelle Tabnick PR with permission.
The South Street Seaport Museum, located on the southern tip of Manhattan, is a community space dedicated to telling the story of New York City’s unique role as a maritime power. The historic seaport, which can still be appreciated today, was a haven for fishing, selling, buying and community relations, and the museum is determined to keep those narratives alive — whether through its collection of art and artifacts, its performance of sea shanties, its guided trips on historic schooners, or its tours of vessels from yesteryear.
One of the museum’s most ambitious projects has finally come to fruition. This past week, the South Street Seaport Museum opened a new exhibition space for its permanent collection. The structure housing these objects is actually a redeveloped warehouse known as the A.A. Thomson & Co. building. Visitors will not only see history on display, they also will enjoy their visit within a historic environment.
The new exhibition of objects within the Thomson’s walls is called Maritime City, an examination of New York City’s four centuries of maritime life and an acknowledgment of the communities who called the local area home. More information from the official news release: “Indigenous Lenape people were the first stewards of the waterways, creating trade routes connecting Manahatta to the sea. In the 17th century, European colonists, enslaved Africans and migrants built on this foundation to give birth to a restless and ambitious city. Later waves of immigration would grow a world capital formed by its oceanic links to the world. Just as the history of New York is woven from many stories, Maritime City employs artifacts to present a tapestry of a global metropolis shaped by the sea. The South Street Seaport Museum interprets these origins, a museum for a maritime city.”
To better understand the changes afoot at the museum, Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Captain Jonathan Boulware, president and CEO of the museum. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How long has the museum been working on redeveloping this historic warehouse?
The first funding was awarded in 2015. Construction began in 2020 and was phased to reach this glorious conclusion, but the restoration really is a capstone on much earlier work. Beyer Blinder Belle and Jan Hird Pokorny, among others, worked with the museum much earlier to plan restoration and upgrades to the museum campus, so this building completion really represents two milestones: First, the final building in the seaport museum’s holdings has now been upgraded, and second, the A. A. Thomson & Co. building is the first building to be fortified against future flooding events. Both are enormous achievements.
What was the warehouse used for throughout its history?
It was built in 1868, first as a tin and metals warehouse. It later held dyes and printing equipment. There’s evidence of light manufacturing on the fifth floor, perhaps overhead shafts that would power small machinery such as wood lathes, drills or sewing machines. Since the 1970s it’s also housed the museum’s maritime reference library and substantial storage for the museum’s large objects, maritime equipment and archives. These were moved out to prepare for construction and are now housed within the Schermerhorn Row block.
What can visitors expect from the new exhibition Maritime City?
It’s a collection of 540 of some of the finest artifacts from the museum’s collection of 28,000 artifacts and 55,000 archival materials. There’s something for everyone, but all of the items connect back to New York’s connection to the water and by the water to the rest of the world. Immigration, toys, manufacturing, tea, ship models (including one stunning 22-foot Cunard ship!) and more. It’s a chance to enjoy a beautiful display in a recently restored 19th-century building, in a remarkable historic district.
Does this new space help get some of the museum’s collection out on public display?
Yes, indeed! It’s a space that allows us to show artifacts of all types: paintings, prints and lithographs, photographs, scrimshaw, toys, printed ephemera and much more.
The exhibition includes some nice examples of maritime painting. What purpose did maritime painting serve? Was there a particular goal some of these painters were trying to attain?
America’s maritime heritage in visual art is crucial to understanding who we are, how we got here and where we can go. Each maritime painting has a story to tell, and is a portrait of our heritage and culture. Additionally, for many historic ships, ship portraits are the only remaining record and visual representation of their existence. Once the art is gone, so is any chance to unlock knowledge of that history.
Every artist and every painting is different in the Seaport Museum collections. For example, the pieces by Antonio Jacobsen (1850-1921) are just some of the thousands of his paintings, which almost exclusively were portraits of ships that he was commissioned to do on a daily basis by ship owners and captains. They wanted him to paint their vessels for posterity. Nearly every ship that sailed in and out of New York Harbor between 1873 and 1919 was chronicled by Jacobsen.
On the opposite end, the work of James Edward Buttersworth (1817-1894) transcends the typical static ship portraits as he painted and placed them in naturalistic, ever-changing seas and weather conditions. Although trained in his native England, Buttersworth’s reputation was made in America, and today, he is considered by many the Americans’ J.M.W Turner.
Is it sad that the museum and a few other buildings in the area are the only remnants of the neighborhood’s unique past? Does New York largely look to the future?
Sad, no. It’s remarkable that such a place was preserved at all! And yes, New York City does largely look to the future. That has its costs, but it’s also an essentially New York characteristic. The very same ambition and audacity that led to the world’s first skyscraper, that has fueled innovation of all sorts, leads directly to a raze-and-renew approach to architecture and buildings; 1960s-era preservation sensibility has shifted that of course. Many incredible buildings were lost before that, but in my mind, it’s inseparable from the very qualities that make New York New York.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
South Street Seaport Museum’s new exhibition is called Maritime City. Click here for more information and tickets.
