43. South Street Seaport

Location: Bounded by John Street, Peck Slip, and Water and South Streets.
Built: Multiple dates, mainly from about 1790-1850 or so
Architect: Multiple architects
National Register Number: 72000883
Listed: October 18, 1972
Visited: January 12 and 13, 2008.



I'm not a native New Yorker--I'm a native Long Islander. (Actually, I was born in Memphis, but that's a lot to explain.) However much I am intoxicated with New York City, I am a Long Islander to the bone.

Dad went to work every day in Manhattan in the middle of its ungovernable era, and kept doing so until he retired shortly after 9/11. If he voiced any complaints, I don't remember them. His ease with the city initially gave him a stategic advantage after the divorce. When he left our house for work the last time, I was somewhere between late 12 and early 13; like a lot of Long Island kids do at that point in their formative years, I was increasingly aware of Long Island's limitations and the city's reputation as a celestial treasure chest of culture unavailable at home. In New York City, the buildings are taller, the stores bigger, the streets denser with possibility. But I was still a kid, I couldn't go alone. My dad, though, was a willing vehicle for these dreams. Dad took me to the late-lamented SoHo store Think Big! a couple of times. We went to MoMa more than a couple of times. The Whitney and the Guggenheim. The Museum of Holography. A Laurie Anderson retrospective (!), followed by Ghostbusters (!!). Mom could take me but didn't, at least not until some years later. She's never quite so phlegmatic about the city: the New York of, say, 1985 or 2008 isn't the city she grew up in, and she never gave herself much of a chance to innoculate herself against its terrors the way my dad did daily.



We went to the South Street Seaport more than anywhere else. He worked only blocks away, at 140 Broadway. What did I love about it? It was lively, I suppose. It was filled with crowds and crowds of people, all the time. I think I was immediately attracted to it because it resembled an urban form I knew intimately well as a Long Islander: the mall. It's a mall. The South Street Seaport is a mall, though because it uses historically important buildings connected to New York City's sealife of way back when, it's a more respectable version of the Sunrise and Roosevelt Field malls where I would spend many longeurs and twenty-dollar bills in the eighties: rows of stores to walk past, to dip in and out of, to go buy buy buy.



It was also very much like The Milleridge Inn, a restaurant I liked as a kid ONLY because it had these cute little stores in a "colonial" village setting. I think back to the village now, with its stores with "shoppe" in the name and Muzak piped from the trees, and think UHH ticky-tacky reifications of "colonial" dating probably from the '30s to '50s, maybe. I think my parents even told me as much. But as a kid, I don't know any better, so I used to just assume the Milleridge stores were all period buildings. Of course. The General Store had "Est. 1672" on it: case closed. I don't quite remember all the details, but I know the South Street Seaport confused me. Even after looking through the museum-y parts and hopping on the boats, it wasn't quite clear to me what its provenance was. I likely thought, as I did with the Milleridge Inn, these buildings were once frequented by Colonialists in breeches and tricorne hats long long ago. It's also possible I thought the reverse: that Schermerhorn Row, like the Bogardus Building and the Fulton Market and Pier 17, were new buildings using old-timey design elements, or old-timey buildings dressed in modern garb. Had we ventured a little further down Front Street, things might've been clearer to me. These are buildings, some Greek Revival, some Federal style, some with subsequent cast-iron mutilations or ornamental subtractions, some still with obvious testament to their use for fishmongering or warehousing, many very old, obviously old, like 1790-1850 old, rickety-looking-even-after-their-restoration old, fucking OLD for Manhattan, what with fire and development tending towards the heartless pulverizing of anything from that era or before.



Initially the stores at South Street Seaport was envisioned as a place for recreations of stores from that time. When we first visited the Seaport, the new Fulton Market building was filled with market-style stalls selling fresh food, this in deference to the waterfront's traditional role for the offloading of goods from the sea. This idea was abandoned in recognition of the fact that the tourists who dominate the place aren't likely to buy a hunk of fine cheese or fresh fish. It had a brief existence as a kind of mall; I remember it had an Express store and a Sam Goody in the mid-nineties. Now it's the site of a seemingly ENDLESS exhibition of flayed and pickled human corpses. Bowne & Company Stationers still exist as a slim concession to the original idea, but whatever the Seaport's original (and current) pretensions to historicalish educamation, not only is it a mall, it's devolved into the kind of mall that always bored me, even as a kid, and the kind of mall that makes me avoid malls as an adult: stores with women's apparel, expensive gadgets, NYC souvenirs of astounding shittiness. The seaport may soon undergo some drastic, potentially awful changes--people in charge are thinking of tearing down Pier 17 and putting something taller--but I'm pleased to note a tiny trend towards the residential, especially as a whole block of buildings (the one pictured above, which is South Street between Beekman Street and Peck Slip) seems to be heading in that direction. They'll probably be inhabited by the same dismaying set of characters colonizing the financial district, but residences would by necessity make the neighborhood a little less mall-like, something that'd gladden the heart of even this unreformed Long Islander.