plans for modernization as electronic systems were developed that wo uld permit better auromarion and monitoring of aids. I also spent several very chi lly weeks in a wetsuit in a small boat placing markers for a pile driver in the New Jersey Intracoastal Waterway after a stormy fall season. Living on Governors Island provided access to all the advantages of life in New York City at minimal expense. My wife and I-newlyweds at the time-lived in Building 315 at the base of Yankee Dock, where the NY Waterways Ferry dropped us off during our recent visit with NMHS. We soon learned exactly how long it rook to walk to the ferry landing during the 1973 oil embargo, when our car would sit in front of our quarters for weeks. Unsold tickets to Broadway shows were donated to the USO in those days, and we saw many of the hits, including the original production of "Pippin" with Ben Vereen-four times(!), I think. I rook evening courses at Hunter College and sang both in the New York Choral Society (concerts at Avery Fisher Hall) and in the cho ir at Trinity Church on Broadway, a short walk from the ferry. Even forty years later, we srill love to visit New York and manage to find our way around with little difficulty. Thanks again for the chance to revisit familiar and not-so-familiar places in New York. DAVID PERCIVAL
Mysric, Connecticut J. P. URANKER WOODCARVER
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6
Around the
Cabin Lamp
South Street's Future Is Upon Us Having given due notice, on 5 August the Museum of the City of New York did not renew its contract to run South Street Seaport Museum-a move made necessary by the insuperable problems raised by superstorm Sandy's rampage through the Lower Manhattan waterfront last fall, which led to closing down its principal building, Schermerhorn Row. Thanks to the Herculean efforts of waterfront director Jonathan Boulware, supported by the volunteer crew of Save Our Seaport, the ships of South Street Seaport Museum survived Sandy's onslaught unharmed. The flooding ashore, however, caused such extensive damage to museum buildings that City Museum trustees felt they could not responsibly take on costs of more than $20 million to replace the ruined mechanical systems of the Seaport's Schermerhorn Row. Captain Boulware, now installed as interim president by a Seaport Museum board of three City officials, wrote museum members: "we are open and operating." Indeed, the refurbished 188 5 coasting schooner Pioneer is now once again sailing out of South Street and the fishing schooner Lettie G. Howard is due back this fall, following shipyard repairs of damage from lack of maintenance. And the museum's great 1885 square rigger Wavertree has been funded by the City's Cultural Affairs Department for a Stage III restoration, while Commissioner Kate Levin seeks a new cultural partner for the museum as a whole. Two years ago we ran a report in Sea History, ''A New Morning in South Street," about how former employees and volunteers at the Seaport Museum had formed Save Our Seaport, a new outfit created to revive the museum, which had been closed in 2011 for lack of public interest and support. Save Our Seaport embarked on a simple quest: "To save South Street's working waterfront, beginning with the schooners Pioneer and Lettie G. Howard, from there continuing inland to restore interest and life to the rest of the museum." I signed up for this, moved by the idea of the Seaport Museum being revived from the sea: that was how it had been founded forty-odd years earlier-we'd come ashore from two schooners loaned for the occasion! And more to the point, in a museum that too often seemed to have lost the bearings of its primary purpose of delivering a message of American seafaring, it established that our ships were there not just to look pretty, imposing as their presence was, bur ro do a job of work-keeping alive our heritage in seafaring for the people of New York. A letter on this vital subject from Dr. Raymond Ashley, chair of the American Ship Trust Committee of the National Maritime Historical Society, appeared in the same issue as our "New Morning" report and makes strong reading today. He's director of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, which operates three square riggers today and is building a fourth to meet the demand for the experience of sailing such ships. In departing, the Museum of the City of New York gave us a priceless victory in what is now shaping up as the battle for South Street; they refused an offer from an encroaching developer to meet half the museum's operating expenses for the next ten years if the museum would turn over to them its three flourishing shops: Bowne Printers and Bowne Stationers (representing centuries-old businesses in the Seaport district) and master carver Sal Polisi's woodworking shop, the Maritime Crafts Center. These Water Street shops face out on the modern city in their Georgian brick buildings, fulfilling the dream of a Seaport telling the deeply purposive story of a city born of the sea. More on this later, if our readers will have it; in the meantime do write me your thoughts on the thoughts offered here. They will be read and may, indeed, be acted on.
-Peter Stanford, NMHS President Emeritus
SEA HISTORY 144, AUTUMN 2013