A Home for Ancient Mariners
New York's cultural abundance often means we may overlook institutions that would be crowning jewels of lesser cities. I often imagine Manhattanites would likelier fly a thousand miles to visit the Brooklyn Museum than take the subway to Eastern Parkway. The same with Snug Harbor Cultural Center, only 10 minutes on the S40 bus from the ferry terminal at St. George, on Staten Island.
The center comprises a campus of buildings, most of them originally part of Sailors' Snug Harbor, a home for retired merchant seamen, on Staten Island's north shore, overlooking the Kill Van Kull. Robert Richard Randall, after his death in 1801, bequeathed money to establish a home for "aged, decrepit, and worn-out sailors." He owned a Greenwich Village farm, where he intended the home to be built. By the end of legal wrangling over his will, however, around 1830, the Greenwich Village property had grown very valuable and the trustees chose to develop the farmland, immediately north of Washington Square, for income, and build the home on Staten Island.
Snug Harbor today hosts a dizzying array of events and attractions. For me, none outdoes the architecture. Five large stone buildings majestically face Richmond Terrace, the roadway along the Kill Van Kull. The buildings, from west to east, are named by letters, A through E. Building C, the main building, dates from 1831–33. With its superb columned portico, the building always ranked as a Greek Revival treasure. However, not until architectural historian Barnett Shepherd's 1976 essay for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians did we know for certain that Minard Lafever designed Building C (and the simpler buildings B and D). We didn't know this when the buildings received landmark designation in 1965, nor when the historian Jacob Landy wrote his outstanding book on Lafever in 1970. So why is that special?
Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park, called Lafever "the Sir Christopher Wren of America." We know Wren for St. Paul's Cathedral in London. But Wren's importance stems not just from St. Paul's, but from his design of prototypical houses and churches that generated the rich vernacular of English and colonial towns and cities. The Manhattan house that's now Fraunces Tavern represents the Wren style, as does Philadelphia's Independence Hall. Builders found elegant solutions in Wren's prototypes to meet the exigent demands of town building during a time of rapid growth.
Just so, in a time of even faster growth, Lafever's prototypical Greek Revival town houses and Gothic Revival churches, copied by builders from Lafever's "pattern books," begat streets and neighborhoods of a charm and usability that we prize no less today than then. (Think Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights.) But of Lafever's own buildings, few remain. Brooklyn Heights boasts three Lafever masterpieces, all of them Gothic. Odd for the architect whose name we will forever associate with Greek Revival that his only surviving buildings in that style are the ones at Snug Harbor. And perhaps no grander grouping of Greek Revival buildings, save for Thomas U. Walter's Girard College in Philadelphia, ever graced our shores.
Building C, with a marvelous neo-Grec Victorian hall, houses the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. The sparklingly restored Building D houses the Noble Maritime Collection, an unsung gem among New York museums, comprising the collection of the maritime painter John Noble, including a reconstruction of the amazing houseboat studio from which he recorded harbor life. We also find documentation of old Sailors' Snug Harbor, that haven of worn-out sailors. The home relocated to North Carolina in the 1970s, allowing the city to purchase the Staten Island campus to transform into a cultural center. The first exhibit at the new Snug Harbor opened in 1977. Thirty years later, the renovation continues.
An attraction of recent vintage is a traditional Chinese Scholars' Garden, the only one of its kind in America. It deserves a column unto itself. On the evening of July 13, the New York Philharmonic will perform works by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky at Snug Harbor. The theater will host Rodgers & Hammerstein's "A Grand Night for Singing" through July 8, and "Urinetown" beginning August 3. Café Botanica, a pleasant restaurant in a beautiful Victorian cottage next to the Chinese garden, serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And don't forget to see the Staten Island Botanical Garden, also on the premises, which will round out your visit to Snug Harbor.
