In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

79  “Look at Our Waterfront! Just Look” How Earth Day Boomed the Seaport The tempest of the Sixties and Seventies set the Seaport’s context as racial tensions flared, construction workers beat antiwar protestors, countercultures blossomed, minorities and women spoke out, pollution became visible , and cultural alienation, political corruption, and physical degradation were palpable. Crises were everywhere. Movements flourished in behalf of civil and equal rights, the environment, peace, and youth. As the city’s old liberal coalition broke apart, it polarized. If the Seaport proclaimed itself as the people, the question now was, which people? While Rockefeller dedicated Ambrose, Lindsay lunched aboard Wavertree, and Galbraith spoke at a fundraiser, Pete Seeger sang at the Seaport, the Friends of the Earth established a headquarters there, and Allen Ginsberg read poetry on Pier 16. As the Seaport’s membership approached twenty-five thousand, it became the largest historical society of its kind in America. Two-thirds were regular members (five dollars or more), while the rest were introductory one-dollar members. Stanford estimated that “four out of five dollars [in membership] came from sources that had never before had anything to do with ships or with history.” As the Seaport spoke to multiple constituencies , it experimented with programs and policies still debated today.1 Rejecting crusty curators and haughty historians, and initially including a staff that proudly had no “prior museum experience,” the Seaport redefined the concept of a museum. It rejected rarefied institutions such as Colonial Williamsburg whose “pre-programed ‘lessons’” left visitors smug and uncritical. As in the innovative theory of the open classroom, Seaport visitors would encounter its buildings, ships, and artifacts in a “casual, ordinary, almost accidental” manner. Carrying that message in 1970 to the annual meeting of the staid American Association of Museums (AAM), Stanford “met a wall of apathy.” But Lindsay’s City Hall endorsed the Seaport’s role as a stage where city dwellers could build a community. 80 “Look at Our Waterfront! Just Look” By then, even landmarks commissar Goldstone championed preservation as “an enormously stabilizing force in a city and in a society that’s increasingly rootless and in a state of flux.” But, as in any movement, ideas varied . Joan Davidson believed the Seaport was important in a “mass society that threatens to crush us all,” while Roger Starr, who as a Times editor called for the city’s “planned shrinkage,” narrowly viewed the Seaport’s mission as one to teach the present about the port’s harsh past. Radically different was John Young, whose reform agenda opposed commercialism. While acknowledging disparate voices, Robert Ferraro still thought that they “could sing along in perfect harmony with Peter Seeger” because their “motivations and goals were the same.”2 Personal politics ran the gamut. While a volunteer wanted a haven to “dream of voyaging,” a retired mariner who was lost on shore admitted that he needed the Seaport and was soon designated Wavertree’s honorary captain. Staff and volunteers also built their own community. Craftsman Michael Creamer recalled “late night gams at the Square Rigger,” as others sang chanties. There even was the lonely biologist who placed an ad in the New York Review of Books hoping to find a mate who “likes [the] South Street Seaport kind of thing.” With many budding waterfront romances, Ferraro jested, “It was as romantic an urban setting as could possibly be imagined, and it was the Sixties after all!” Yet prospective mates should worry because, Helen Hayes retorted, “they’ll always be competing with ships and had better learn to be satisfied with second place.”3 To Starr’s dismay, the Seaport community included nearby projects whose population he wanted to downsize. In addition to hosting a Girl Mariner troop and Sea Scout Explorers from Chinatown aboard Ambrose, the Seaport worked with the Hamilton-Madison Settlement House and the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association. The latter’s director especially wanted children to see old-time craftsmen in action. Like NYSCA’s Allon Schoener, who berated museums for dodging social issues, Stanford believed that handcrafts would “generate pride and respect too often missing in deprived families.” Yet Thomas Hoving, who as director of the Metropolitan Museum hired Schoener to curate its controversial Harlem on My Mind exhibit, admitted that his attempt to democratize knowledge backfired. Having none of the Met’s cultural baggage, the Seaport, said Philip Yenawine, struck NYSCA as “wonderful, possible, idealistic and crazy.”4 [3.141.35.60] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 08...

Share