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179  “The Museum Was Intellectually and Financially Bankrupt” How the Seaport Fared after the Bubble Burst Upon arriving as president in 1985, Peter Neill realized that the Seaport “was intellectually and financially bankrupt.” Museum reformers did rein in the SSSC, whose development-minded trustees, said Lowery, were “either gone or thoroughly dispirited.” Still, Lowery pursued his Phase III plans for a hotel, a marina, and high-rises but was limited by Manhattan ’s real estate swings, the LPC, and the fish market. As part of a national shift away from hiring curators or historians to administer museums, Peter Aron, as chairman of the SSSM search, was looking for a person well versed in museum management who could develop educational and cultural programs. Aron asked Neill, head of the National Trust’s Maritime Division, for suggestions, and Neill unabashedly suggested himself. After being selected, he asked to keep his Washington job, which Aron rejected as embarrassing to the Seaport. Neill made it clear that he would not be answerable to Lowery. Thus, he would set his own course, especially after Aron began a twelve-year stint as museum chairman in 1987 and Neill merged the presidencies of the SSSM and the SSSC in 1989. But his success depended on gaining the necessary income, philanthropy, endowment , and city subsidy.1 Sharp and creative, Robert “Peter” Neill III skippered the Seaport for nineteen years. Seymour liked him because he “looked so good on paper, and he talked so good.” But he was not a curator, scholar, museum manager , or even an expert in large-ship preservation. Though occasionally an outspoken renegade in the crusty museum world, he could pour on the charm with the media, yachtsmen, preservationists, activists, and residents who were often hard to please. As a youth, he had watched the Mississippi River’s traffic, read C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, and was enthralled by Irving Johnson’s National Geographic travelogues . “I learned of another hemisphere beyond St. Louis,” he recalled, 180 “The Museum Was Intellectually and Financially Bankrupt” “of native girls with bared breasts, and of tides and squalls and other natural phenomena.” Johnson inspired his “teenage flight from the Midwest to subsequent roaming.” That was typical. “Most seamen are dreamers,” said Melvin Madison, a nautical shopkeeper in Gotham. “Most seemed to come from the Midwest, from farmland, where they’d never seen anything but a river—a lake. They never saw an ocean. And possibly reading, or from movies, the allure of the ships, the allure of foreign lands, brought them to the waterfront. Now once they were bitten it was hard to get away.” Leaving St. Louis before its Gaslight Square failed, Neill was sent to a prep school in New Hampshire. He first saw the ocean when he visited Mystic Seaport and toured Charles W. Morgan before heading to Stanford University to study English. After completing a master’s program at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, he moved to Connecticut, lectured at Yale University during its tumultuous 1970s, and then headed the Branford Land Trust, which fought a proposed shopping mall. Criticizing developers who pushed unlimited growth, he wrote in the Times, those malls were “a flagrant violation of the conservation ethic.”2 In 1979, Neill was hired as executive director of Schooner Inc., in New Haven. Inspired by Clearwater’s program, it had formed in 1975 and expanded by buying J. N. Carter, a bugeye ketch that had been restored by Pioneer owner Russell Grinnell. Schooner relied on school contacts for 70 percent of its operating revenue, and Neill used new business models to float his ship. He read about Lance Lee, who applied Kurt Hahn’s Outward Bound philosophy to establish boat-building apprenticeships, and in 1981 offered his ship to an educator who was creating the Sound School. Funded by the city of New Haven, a federal grant, and a philanthropist, it began with one hundred students—60 percent male and 70 percent minority—and became a marine-centered, magnet public high school. Just as the Pioneer Marine School had been praised, the National Trust applauded the school’s use of J. N. Carter for giving students “a sense of self worth and connectedness.” To prorate the cost of the ketch and shipwright across multiple users, Neill also formed and headed the Connecticut Marine Science Consortium, in which he joined the Sound School, Schooner, and four campuses of Connecticut State University. It was, said the Times, one of the state...

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