Museum of the City of New York at the South Street Seaport Museum

Museum of the City of New York, 2012

Museum of the City of New York at the South Street Seaport Museum

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

--Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part III

I’ve actually worked for the South Street Seaport Museum three separate times. The latest was in 2012, when the Museum of the City of New York temporarily assumed direction at South Street. I was one of several co-curators involved in creating the exhibition that showcased South Street’s varied collections and one of its priceless resources, the Schermerhorn Row buildings, built in 1810-1812 and filled with layer upon layer of lower Manhattan’s history.

My portion of the exhibition tied the Row’s and the Seaport District’s past to artifacts embodying the daily lives of generations of coffee and tea merchants, fish market workers, burlap bag vendors, merchant seamen, and tattoo artists on the New York waterfront. The installation included the wonderful Fulton Fish Market, a short film by Bob Sacha. Designed by Pure + Applied and Studio Joseph.

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Fulton Fish Market, a short film by Bob Sacha

Fulton Fish Market, a short film by Bob Sacha

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Schermerhorn Row likes to tantalize with its buried treasure. When conservators and renovators peeled off a later layer of lath and plaster inside the 200-year-old building, they revealed 19th-century graffiti inscribed on the whitewashed brick wall. For years my colleagues and I had been trying to find any portrait of James P. Bennett (1845-1908), an Irish-born coffee roaster and merchant in the Row. To no avail. Lo and behold, Bennett was there all the time behind the plaster, probably immortalized by one of his workmen.

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An amazing larger-than-life machine in Schermerhorn Row, left in place by the Cohen family, Polish Jewish immigrants whose workers used it to dry, clean, and recycle burlap bags circa 1920. For 150 years the South Street waterfront was lined with businesses that employed distinctive tools and contraptions to serve a bustling clientele of importers, exporters, shippers, and seamen along the East River.

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