Once Tempest-Tossed, the South Street Seaport Museum Debuts Refurbished Building and Sails to Bright Future
On Wednesday, the post-Hurricane Sandy recovery of the South Street Seaport Museum reached a major milestone, wth the ceremonial rededication and unveiling of the historic A.A. Thomson & Co. Warehouse at 213 Water Street. “We are transitioning from a museum that needed saving to a museum that is growing, and serving ever more people,” said the organization’s president, Jonathan Boulware.
“This is the first among the museum’s campus of buildings to be hardened against a Sandy-like event,” he continued, recalling that the museum was unable to debut a major exhibit until 2016, four years after the storm. Thanks to $12 million in upgrades over the last four years, he said, “if a Sandy were to happen tomorrow, although we wouldn’t necessarily be able to open the next day, it wouldn’t be years. It would be weeks.”
Noting that Wednesday’s celebration came 12 years and one day after Hurricane Sandy, Captain Boulware observed, “the electrical connections now come in from the street and go up, encased in concrete, to the second floor. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, electrical rooms, fire safety systems, elevator control rooms — all of those are now on the second floor. The building itself is prepared for that next event.”
The structure, dating from 1868, was originally used to store tin and other metals offloaded from freighters moored along what was then a thriving commercial waterfront. In recent years, it has been part of the museum, but, as Captain Boulware explained, “it has always been back-of-house, apart from a gallery and event space on the first floor.” That is now changing.
The historic 12,000-square-foot warehouse has been transformed and made fully accessible to all visitors. The inaugural exhibition, “Maritime City,” to open next March and span the first three floors, will feature works of art, historic artifacts, and archival materials from the extensive collections of the Seaport Museum.
Captain Boulware described how the South Street Seaport Museum has evolved as it recovered, noting, “we had some really interesting opportunities coming out of the pandemic. One of them — and I’ll say I’m not sure that we would have had the courage to do this otherwise — was a move to pay-what-you-wish admission, which did not have a negative impact on the amount of money we received from visitors, but did have a dramatic impact in the number of visitors that we see.” In the first year after the pandemic, the Museum drew 26,000 visitors. After the change in admissions pricing, attendance jumped to 46,000, and last year topped 88,000.
State Senator Brian Kavanagh recalled, “my first encounter with South Street as a hub for historical experience of a New York from another time was as the kid of an immigrant Irish cop, living in Staten Island.”
“And my father gathered up these many children, there were six of us, and we came here when I was very young, and it made a very, very big impression,” he said. “It is important that we find opportunities to acknowledge that history, to acknowledge the complexity of continuing to build a city like this, to modernize it, and to make sure it is competing in the modern world.”
Captain Boulware concluded the rededication ceremony by saying, “The ambition, the purpose of this rededication, is embedded in the museum’s mission, which is to interpret, to celebrate, to acknowledge the city’s rise from the sea — its role as an immigrant port, its role as a financial capital. And I will say on a personal note, in a moment like this time in American history, there is no place that I would rather be than New York City.”