Preserving South Street Seaport: The Dream and Reality of a New York Urban Renewal District

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix Preface and Acknowledgments Preserving South Street Seaport is part of a larger history that began in a 1981 doctoral seminar at the College of William and Mary under William Appleman Williams. Setting a framework for South Street Seaport,* that larger study examines the origins and development of the nation’s leading maritime museums—in Salem, MA; New Bedford, MA; Mystic, CT; Newport News, VA; San Francisco, CA; and New York, NY. With over two decades of research on a topic that few historians have assessed, I owe so much to those who have helped in each segment of the forthcoming book, which will be titled “Preserving Maritime America: Public Culture and Memory in the Making of the Nation’s Great Marine Museums.” But Preserving South Street Seaport is about much more than a maritime museum. As I did in writing Preserving the Old Dominion (1993) and Preserving Historic New England (1995), I use a wide-angle lens to view my subject, in this case the Seaport, in the context of Gotham’s debates over preservation, cultural identity, and public policy over the past half century. I am a historian, but Preserving South Street Seaport is premised on what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called a “thick description.” South Street was enmeshed in what he saw as “webs of significance” that need to be unraveled, many of which philosopher Michel Foucault called “relations of power,” whereby its meaning was continually reshaped—internally and externally—in the larger society.1 With South Street, I have encountered some typical research problems. As a private institution, the Seaport was under no obligation to open its files to me. When I started my research, president Peter Neill opened the * South Street Seaport is the trademarked name of the South Street Seaport Museum. It lies within the South Street Seaport Historic District, which once included the Fulton Fish Market and now includes residences, businesses, and a shopping mall. Much confusion has arisen because of the mall’s appropriation of the name and the Internet URL South Street Seaport. I will use the terms “Seaport,” “Seaport Museum,” “South Street,” and “South Street Seaport” to refer to the museum, as did its founders and makers. The term “seaport” (in lower case) will refer to the district in general. x Preface and Acknowledgments files that preceded his hiring in 1985. I am grateful to the J. Aron Charitable Foundation for allowing me to use materials collected by long-serving trustees Jack and Peter Aron, which precede and follow Neill’s hiring. I supplemented them with public records and interviews. Many Seaport administrators and employees were reluctant to help; few said much that could detract from its image, fundraising, or prospects. Former staff, trustees , and friends, however, were most helpful. Even within the nation’s maritime-museum community, there has been a reluctance to talk about South Street. As one curator told me, “It’s not a pretty story.” Within the Council of American Maritime Museums, there was, said one director, “an unwillingness to publicly criticize a friend; . . . an interest in showing a unified, non-controversial public face; and concern about a stinging public response.” What is interesting is that a vast majority of Americans regard museums as “a more trustworthy source of objective formulation than books or television,” but museum managers are hesitant to allow an independent researcher to know what goes on in the boardroom, in the craft shop, or on the poop deck.2 A few words are also in order about this book’s construction. Those who have written about ships have customarily been past or present sailors whose attitudes were shaped by personal experience and tradition. Hence, those men (and it has been a masculine pursuit) have used the feminine pronoun for ships. I have, however, followed the course of Lloyd’s List in using neutral pronouns, except in quoted matter, for those vessels. Also, the article the has been deleted from ship names, as in Wavertree, except again in quoted matter. And lastly, as is the case in writing about organizations , abbreviations have been often substituted for long titles. A short list follows this section. Besides the many comments made at various presentations of this research, I have been helped (often considerably) by many Seaporters, museum friends, interested parties, consultants, and historians and preservationists (public and academic). Their kind assistance made this book possible. Besides those who requested anonymity, they are Peter A. Aron, Joseph Baiamonte, Kent Barwick, Debbie Swift Batty, Bronson Binger, Jonathan Boulware...