With its fabled fish market long gone, battered by the great recession and then Hurricane Sandy, New York’s South Sea Seaport at times has looked like a throwback to the city’s bad old days, when the 1960s oxymoron of “urban renewal” threatened to destroy Manhattan’s maritime heritage.
But back then was when Peter Stanford appeared. Brooklyn-born, a lifelong small-boat sailor who enlisted in his teens with the U.S. Navy during World War II, Stanford left a 1960s career in advertising to found the South Street Seaport Museum. Before he died of a stroke last week, Stanford, 89, saw his beloved South Street reopen March 17, after a $13 million restoration that enabled the first public gallery showing since Sandy’s flooding.
Today, we mourn the passing of our friend Peter Stanford: https://t.co/ewWZqNVjvP pic.twitter.com/BMRzGHInwi
— Save Our Seaport (@SaveOurSeaport) March 25, 2016
The city, Stanford often said, “was a seaport before it was anything else.” The brick row houses of Fulton Street, the late 19th century stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, the fish dealers, and traffic on the East River made it one of the last places where that culture survived.
By the mid-20th century, it was threatened. When writer Joseph Mitchell roamed the streets of lower Manhattan and the waterfront, he wrote of fish market characters like “Old Mr. Flood,” and Louis Morino, proprietor of the Fulton café Sloppy Louie’s, as if they were already the last of their breed.
In the 1960s came urban renewal and its mania for tearing down old working-class neighborhoods. With his wife Norma, Stanford organized the preservation group Friends of South Street, recruited political and philanthropic backers, and managed to acquire landmark status for the neighborhood.
Stanford parted ways with the museum in 1976 to become longtime president of the National Maritime Historical Society. With closer ties to commercial developers, the South Street Seaport staged a gala opening in 1983, but had its ups and downs over the years when hoped-for revenue goals fell short.
Stanford was instrumental in saving a number of historic vessels, including the Ambrose lightship and the John W. Brown World War II Liberty-class cargo ship, now a working steamship museum in Baltimore. His successors in New York this month secured a $4.8 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to renovate more buildings.
This summer will see the return of another Peter Stanford prize: the 1885 sailing ship Wavertree. The 1893 schooner Lettie C. Howard will be reactivated as the museum’s sailing school vessel.
Even as non-profits, maritime museums are a tough business, too often beset with funding crises and leadership turmoil. That the South Street Seaport – in one of the world’s premier tourist destination cities – has survived turmoil on a grander scale says something about the grit and determination of Peter Stanford and those who followed him.
