50b. South Street Seaport Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by East River, Brooklyn Bridge, Fletcher Alley, and Pearl and South Streets
Built: from circa 1781 to circa 2000; mainly 19th century
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 78001884
Listed: December 12, 1978
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: Historic American Buildings Survey; NYCLPC Reports for individual buildings and the district



Unlike the aforementioned parking lot, 273 Water Street (the fourth building on the left) has a pedigree. Erected no later than 1781 and possibly as early as 1773, it would be the third-oldest building in Manhattan were it not for the fact that it was reconstructed from a pile of rubble not too long ago, making its claim to antiquity about as doubtful as Fraunces Tavern's. It's also called the Captain Joseph Rose house after the guy who originally owned it--before this part of Manhattan was enhanced with landfill, he used to keep his ship in the back. But the REALLY noteworthy thing about 273, the thing that makes eyes pop out all cartoon-like, is its garish history as Kit Burns' Sportsman's Hall, a place of ill repute notorious for its deathmatches between rats and terriers. Luc Sante's Low Life also tells of animals buried under bleachers and the ghastly smell they made. Awfully colorful, right? Right. It's apartments now.

279 Water Street is the wooden building on the left corner. It's operated as a bar since 1794, making it probably the oldest bar in New York City. By contrast, the oldest bar/pub/tavern in Boston goes back to 1780 and New Orleans to 1772; for London and Dublin, the most likely claimants date back to the 17th century; and Berlin's reputed oldest is from 1525. We have some catching up to do.

50a. South Street Seaport Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by East River, Brooklyn Bridge, Fletcher Alley, and Pearl and South Streets
Built: from circa 1781 to circa 2000; mainly 19th century
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 78001884
Listed: December 12, 1978
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: Historic American Buildings Survey; NYCLPC Reports for individual buildings and the district



This designation could be seen as a token of the preservation movement's growing confidence throughout the seventies. First, the Schermerhorn Row Block gets landmarked by the National Parks Service in February 18, 1971, followed by 170-176 John Street on May 13. Obviously unsatisfied, a year later the Parks Services designates the South Street Seaport a landmark, which it defines as the Schermerhorn block plus four neighboring ones. And six years after that, it mightily stretches its blanket of protection yet again with the South Street Seaport Historic District designation, which (if the map on page 12 is accurate) includes all of the aforementioned sites plus seven-and-change more blocks and four piers. (AND from 1978 to 2002, six boats connected with the Seaport get landmarked as well.)



In what must've been an aggressive attempt at discouraging future interlopers from ruining the neighborhood, the district includes some things that are ehh wellll maybe not so so "historical": a 34-story skyscraper from '83, a '74 ConEd substation that dominates the block it's on, and an acre's worth of parking.

49. Schermerhorn Row Block

A.K.A.: New York State Maritime Museum Block
Location: Block bounded by Front, Fulton, South, and John Streets
Built: 1811-1849
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 71000547
Listed: February 18, 1971
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: Historic American Buildings Survey; NYCLPC Reports



Worth $2.5 million in 1848--about $55 million today--Peter Schermerhorn was once one of the wealthiest men in New York City. And of course this means nothing to us now. My city guides variously call Schermerhorn a "ship chandler and developer," a "leading merchant," "one of New York's leading merchants...ran a ship chandler's business..." and so on: so many facts given without context, without a sense of scale, allowing the reader to brush off the guy's life like dandruff from a shoulder. Most of my sources don't even bother to clarify whether Schermerhorn Row was built by Peter Schermerhorn Sr. (1749-1826) or Peter Schermerhorn Jr. (1781-1852) or both, and I have respectable sources saying or implying one or the other. The Astors and the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers are all a lot closer to us--they got far, far, richer, and left us a slew of surviving monuments attesting to this wealth. In contrast to their libraries and museums, the most tangible evidence of Peter Schermerhorn's career was these unsexy warehouses associated with the fishy stink of the seaport; hard labor, not exalted intellect.



Yet after a little Googling, I found something my guides didn't even hint at: Peter Schermerhorn Jr. was a fellow passenger on Alexis de Tocqueville's first voyage to the United States. Indeed, Schermerhorn suggested to the French sociologist certain notions that would later be key to his landmark book Democracy in America, including the inevitability of civil war, the the country's lack of party politics, and the blot of moneylust on the national character. That last one is an odd, possibly contradictory, possibly hypocritical stance for a millionaire to take, and in this bit of moral knottiness, a hint of the human being behind the name. It makes me wish there was more for me to chew on.



The constituents of Schermerhorn Row Block were originally built in the Federal Style, then remodeled with Greek Revival storefronts, then cast-iron storefronts, then remodeled again and again to fit the needs of its tenants until the Jan Hird Pokorny renovation removed much of the architectural accretions gained from over 150 years of use. Some architectural critics have decried this as a loss of the building's character. Paul Goldberger:

"The brick fronts have been sterilized, made so clean that all sense of time has been wiped out; worse still, the distinctions between the houses that make up the row have disappeared, and so this block looks more like a single overblown mass of brick than like a real 19th-century street."

I sort of know what he means. The bricks and the mortar are both a disconcerting frosty white, but it doesn't make the buildings look new, or even ahistorical. Instead--and I don't know how else to put this without resorting to lazy personification--they look shellshocked.



Still, you don't have to look too closely to find history manifesting itself. The renovation didn't straighten some of the lintels over the windows; in fact, they're so crooked it's almost a wonder how the buildings are still structurally sound. You get a better sense of just that inside Schermerhorn Row, subject to a recent interior renovation by Beyer Blinder Belle. The top floors of these buildings are now museum space, and while there were some good exhibits on ships and whaling--I was particularly fond of a segment from the silent Down to the Sea in Ships, shown in loop--mostly what I wanted to do was ignore the placards and vitrines, and look at the walls, the ceilings; the bricks, the beams. They had a hypnotic cast. Plaster and paint were still partially stuck to them. You could easily imagine these interiors' dusty days and nights, storing cargo from every part of the world. And while I know they're in perfectly fine condition and aren't going to fall down any time soon, they looked a little vulnerable, groaning with the weight of history, knowing more than I do.

48. John Street Building No. 170--176

A.K.A.: Hickson W. Field Building; Baker, Carver & Morrell Building
Location: 170-176 John Street
Built: 1840
Architect: Attributed to Town & Davis
National Register Number: 71000546
Listed: May 13, 1971
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYCLPC Report



It is not like the others, this former warehouse. Fronted with granite, not the red brick of its fellow Greek Revival neighbors and contemporaries, and so devoid of ornamentation the windows have no lintels (and barely anything in the way of sills), there is little here to distract the eye. This doesn't mean it's ugly or boring; rather, it is curiously modern without being modernist. Unfortunately its grey repose is too easy a fit with its surroundings. Move from South Street Seaport's main drag on Fulton Street to John Street, and the character of the neighborhood drastically changes, going from tourist-quick to parking-lot-dead in under a block.

47. AMBROSE (lightship)

A.K.A.: Lightship No. 87, Relief, F-LS512, Scotland
Location: Pier 16, off Fulton Street
Built: 1907
Builder: U.S. Lighthouse Service; New York Shipbuilding Co.
National Register Number: 84002758
Listed: September 7, 1984
Visited: February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: NRHP Registration Form



In the olden days, locations deemed impractical for a lighthouse were instead serviced by permanently-anchored lightships. Lightships are often named after their charges, and so No. 87 was known as the Ambrose when it guided craft through the Ambrose Channel, the shipping channel that leads into New York Harbor. Its career as the Ambrose lasted from 1908 until 1932 during the era of the Cunard and the White Star Lines, back when ships weren't the also-ran to planes in the international transportation sweepstakes they way they are today. (It also became the first permanent radio beacon in the United States in 1921, this at the very beginning of commercial radio broadcasting.)Other light stations, before and since, have also called the Ambrose; and after No. 111 took its place, the No. 87 later served various locations throughout the Northeast until it was decommissioned in 1966, then donated to South Street Seaport in 1968. (The Ambrose Lightship was replaced by a "Texas Tower" lighthouse--sort of a lighthouse on an oil rig--in 1967, and became fully automated and people-free in 1988.) In its retirement, No. 87 has great stories to tell and all, yet here at the seaport, it's something of a fabulous unicorn in captivity, incongruously docked at a maritime museum-mall when it spent most of its career out stationed in the Atlantic hinterwaters.

I now know more about lightships than I ever imagined I'd know.

Until Saturday, every time I visited the Seaport in service of this blog, something prevented me from boarding the Ambrose. Usually the metal ramp that led to the boat had a puny piece of rope blocking its threshold, signifying it was off-limits. I went to the Seaport early hoping to get this responsibility out of the way, but no, the rope was still there. The water was a little choppy for some reason and in my mild disappointment I stood by the ship mesmerized by the way such a huge thing--488 tons--could bob up and down so gently. And weirdly, out of the corner of my eye, I could just barely catch somebody peeking out of one of the boat's portholes. Thinking somebody might come out, I wait a while and still, nothing. I come back after twelve, which is when the boats are supposed to open, I think. No, it remains blocked off. There are open doors on the top of the boat, the Peking has visitors, but there's nothing on the Ambrose--an oasis of ghost ship in the middle of one America's great tourist traps. I sit and wait outside on Pier 17 for about a half an hour. (I've got nothing better to do.) No sign of life. I go inside and eat a meal in one of the mall's better restaurants. I have a window seat so I can nervously check the Ambrose every so often. Eventually, in the middle of my meal, I notice a family boarding it, unencumbered by any rope. The weirdest thing. I haven't taken my eyes off the boat for more than a minute (probably less) and yet, somehow...whatever. So I rush my meal and pay my bill and finally board the thing, after six months of waiting, wondering if I'M ACTUALLY NOT ALLOWED TO BE ON THIS AND I'M GONNA BE IN TROUBLE and such. I take pictures of nothing in particular. I take pictures to take pictures. Then I see a guy's there, sitting down. Dude doesn't even acknowledge my presence, doesn't look at me. A gnome. Then he goes back into the ship. And that's it. I don't even bother going below deck to check out the details of the monotonous, lonely life lightship tenders must've lived. I'm not sure who was being weird here: sea people, museum people, or blogger people.

This is the last of the South Street Seaport ships I'm covering for now. There are two other landmarked ships connected to the Seaport, both I'll have to cover when it's not so cold: the Lettie G. Howard, which according to her own Myspace page (!) is wintering in Kings Point, New York, and the John A. Lynch, whose miserable story is recounted here.

46. W. O. DECKER (tugboat)

A.K.A.: Russell I, Susan Dayton
Location: Pier 16, off Fulton Street
Built: 1930
Builder: Russell & Co.
National Register Number: 96000962
Listed: September 13, 1996
Visited: November 11, 2007 and January 12, 2008



The W.O. Decker is the other tugboat in the South Street Seaport Museum's collection. It's less cute than the Helen McAllister, but still dandy-handsome, its wooden body decked out in ketchup and mustard colors. It seems far older than the other tug (I would've guessed circa Gilded Age), but in fact it's a good thirty years younger, having been built for a Queens towing company in 1930. Like the non-landmarked Peking and Pioneer, W.O. is available for private use: in this case, four-to-six-hour tours of New York's waterfront, from wildlife to industrial sites. Since I rarely get a good, close look at the edges of urban life, these tours are awfully tempting but mad expensive. For me, anyway. At $125 to $180, that's the kind of money I can't part with easily. It's also tempting and expensive enough for New York Magazine to position these trips as a choice for the discerning, Circle Line tours for people who have no patience with fat sweaty tourists and their fat sweaty fanny-packs. Ugh, is there anything NYM can't infect with its aspirational cooties?

45. ADMIRAL DEWEY (tugboat)

A.K.A.: Georgetown, Helen McAllister
Location: Pier 17, off Fulton Street
Built: 1900
Builder: Burlee Dry Dock Company
National Register Number: 02001619
Listed: December 27, 2002
Visited: November 11, 2007 and January 12, 2008



For the first fifty or so years of its life, the Admiral Dewey used to carry coal barges around New York Harbor. After a stint in Charleston, the boat was purchased by the McAllister Towing and Transportation Co., who renamed it the Helen McAllister. (Nearly all of the boats in the company's fleet get the McAllister last name, like they were a maritime Ramones.) It was donated to the South Street Seaport Museum in 2000. Although the museum already had a tug in its collection (the W.O. Decker), you can see the wisdom in getting a second. Tugs are likeable, almost cute. They've got family appeal.



There is a striking number of children's books about tugboats on amazon.com. Virgina Lee Burton's books for children (Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Katy and the Big Snow) suggest that even the most ungainly machine can be not just anthropomorphized, but made loveable. Tugboats, though, have quite a lot with which children can identify, however unconsciously: even though they're little boats in a world of big boats, sometimes the big boats need the little boats to get around. The look of the Helen McAllister, its Cat in the Hat stack and the huge beard-like mass on its prow--it's impossible not to see a content face in it.

44. WAVERTREE

A.K.A.: Southgate, Don Ariano N.
Location: Pier 17, off Fulton Street
Built: 1885
Builder: Oswald Mordaunt & Co.
National Register Number: 78001887
Listed: June 13, 1978
Visited: November 11, 2007 and January 12, 2008



Uh...ships! Yeah! I keep protesting that I'm fairly ignorant about wide swathes of architecture, but ships? If my brain goes limp at the vocabulary of Gothic architecture, it shuts down when faced with things as simple as "starboard" and "port." Skimming through the 1969 book The Wavertree: An Ocean Wanderer makes me regret this somewhat. "The Wavertree was in the jute trade from Chittagong, first: that meant plenty of Trade Wind sailing--where the flying fish roam--and just getting past Good Hope outwards..." This line is a drop in the ocean of facts, but the waves it produces builds and builds with suggestion of a lost world until there is no shore it doesn't touch. And that's only the foreword. Most of the book is devoted Captain George Spiers' personal account of his trip on the Wavertree as it sailed from Port Townsend in Washington to Chile to Portland, Oregon to tiny Runcorn in England, passing through rotten weather and rundown seaports no doubt transformed by time. This was from 1907-08, this when the cast-iron ship was already a relic and only a few years away from decommissioning. The book has pictures of it in its incarnation as a sand barge in Buenos Aires, its rigging gone. Even knowing just fragments of its tiny role in an industrious world gone by, you could genuinely be saddened by this emasculation--and touched (yeah, touched) by its loving restoration by the museum.

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.

17. First Police Precinct Station House

AKA: First Precinct Police Station; New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Offices
Location: 100 Old Slip
Built: 1909-1911
Architects: Hunt & Hunt
National Register Number: 82001193
Listed: October 29, 1982
Visited: August 5 and 26, 2007



A great number of modern thinkers I respect, ranging from Christopher Lasch and Norman Mailer to Tom Frank and Simon Reynolds, seriously bug out -- vomit coming to the throat and all -- when people adopt discontextual historical styles for seemingly fuck-all purpose, airily referring to ironized mix-and-match as a peculiarly modern sickness. OK, OK, so if this is true, answer me this: what's a distinctly pre-modern New York City police station doing decked out as an Italian Renaissance palazzo? Don't look at me, I don't even know what a palazzo is.

Wikipedia says it's "a grand building of some architectural ambition that is the headquarters of a family of some renown or of an institution, or even what the British would call a 'block of flats' or a tenement." The AIA Guide to New York City is no more specific: "the super town house of Italian nobility (i.e., palace), later a description of any big, urbane building in an Italian town." NOT HELPFUL! Especially when (concerning the latter definition) the First Police Precinct Station House is not especially big, nor in Italy. Ah well. (Today I find the thicket of architectural terminology intractable. One day I won't.) But this I know: It looks like it was covered in giant peppermint Chiclets, which apparently means the surface is "rusticated."



The building housed the 1st Precinct of the New York City Police Deparment until 1909 to 1973, when a merger with the 4th Precinct necessitated a move into bigger quarters. (It is somewhat staggering to think criminals were ever processed in such a handsome building -- were they contemptuous of such fancy, or was it viewed as just another old-looking building in a city crowded with them?) The station house was left fallow until 1993, when it was used as the offices of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.



Since 2001, the building has housed the New York City Police Museum. You have to wonder how video displays and artifacts in glass vitrines could possibly communicate anything of value. What the police do strikes me as being essentially social and psychological in nature, and hance maybe better described by a work of the imagination like a movie, a TV show, or a book. And yet the museum is compelling, intimate. Its features -- a documentary about pioneer women officers and the preposterous crap they had to deal with; mugshots of hoods long dead; a portrait of a uniformed office with icy blue eyes and a leather jacket; uniforms; weapons; a motorcycle; a police car -- have enough evocativeness to fuel a museum-goers' own, entirely private, work of the imagination about police life.

9. Municipal Ferry Pier

AKA: Battery Maritime Building
Location: 11 South Street
Built: 1906-1909
Architects: Walker & Morris
National Register Number: 76001246
Listed: December 12, 1976
Visited: July 21, 2007



Manhattan used to be lousy with piers, just lousy with 'em. They were once the linchpins of turn-of-the-century New York's transport infrastructure. Now they're not. First the speed of car and subway travel made interborough ferries a poky option for most commuters; then a post-war economic shift away from manufacturing, not to mention containerization and competition from New Jersey, killed off the commercial usefulness of NYC's waterfront. So by the 1970s and 80s, once-bustling piers were left abandoned in the river to rot away, or serve as meeting places for furtive gay sex (waaay before my time, don't you dare look at me like that).

The Battery Maritime Building was blindsided by these changes. It served commuters going to and from Brooklyn until 1938, a mere thirty years. Afterwards, it was subject to decades of use -- and underuse -- as home to several city agencies, and launch-point for ferries traveling to Governors Island. When I first saw it in 2002, it looked a magnificent wreck, rusting and painted a sickly blue. Since then, Jan Hird Pokorny and Tishman Construction gave it a fitting restoration that reconstructed much than had been lost and recovered the building's original color scheme of pistachio, lime, and strawberry ice cream.



The colors aren't the only interesting thing about the building, mind (I mean, look at that decorative rivet work, for one!) but they compel me because they seem so queerly modern: they wouldn't be out of place on a product from Target or IKEA, and yeah, I mean that as a COMPLIMENT, mofo. And yet I can't think of many contemporary Manhattan buildings that really run riot with color the way the Battery Maritime and a few maverick cast-irons do. Even the stuntiest of post-modern stunts usually work their tomfoolery on a building's profile or massing or detailing. (The Westin New York at Times Square and Schnabel's "Venetian" [yeah, sure] apartment repainting comes to mind as exceptions.) They all seem stuck with black, white, or glassy grays and blues that evanesce into the sky under some weathers IF they're lucky to be so graceful.

Only a few weeks ago, the NYC Economic Development Corporation announced the building would be transformed into a food marketplace/event space, ferry terminal, and hotel complex. Now it's a deserving place, don't get me wrong, but color me skeptical: where's the foot traffic going to come from? There's been explosive residential growth in the Financial District lately (as we'll see, a LOT of landmarked commercial buildings in the area are now fancy-schmancy apartment buildings), but from what I've seen, it hasn't made the pier's immediate surroundings any livelier. The best it can hope for is capturing some of the folks coming off the Staten Island Ferry or the tourists headed for the Statue of Liberty.