Reconsidering South Street Seaport

“Cities are fun!” Those words, accompanied by a picture of the real estate developer James Rouse, appeared in 1981 on the cover of Time magazine.Today, Rouse’s handiwork, at least in New York City, is widely considered a failure.In 1981, Rouse was just getting set to open his latest “waterfront festival marketplace,” the South Street Seaport. He’d already given Boston its Faneuil Hall Marketplace (1976) and Baltimore its Harborplace (1980).After years of building suburban shopping centers and developing the new town of Columbia, Md., Rouse (1914-96) was widely hailed as an urban savior, the creator of new hubs of excitement that redeemed moribund tracts of old cities.Of course, Manhattanites never experienced retail decline the way people in most other old northern cities did. Still, a Rouse marketplace was — remember? — so prestigious that it was held up as one of the things that announced, early in the mayoral administration of Ed Koch, that New York had come back from its 1970s brink of ruin.In 2004, General Growth Properties of Chicago acquired the Rouse Company, and became the leaseholder of the South Street Seaport. This summer, General Growth unveiled an ambitious plan to dismantle much of the Rouse-built complex and replace it with something more au courant.General Growth plans to replace the Rouse-built Pier 17 marketplace pavilion, as well as two old Fulton Fish Market structures, between Fulton and Beekman streets, with a mixed-use complex.In the plan, on the inland side of the site, where the fish market used to operate, will rise a 42-story residential and hotel tower designed by SHoP Architects, one of New York’s hottest architectural firms. Renderings show that the tower, which has a projected completion date of 2014, will have a distinctive exterior latticework screen intended to evoke fishing nets.One of the fish market buildings the tower will displace will be moved to the outer edge of the pier. This is the so-called Tin Building. The original Tin Building rose in 1907 but was destroyed in a 1995 fire, following which, in the same year, the building was reconstructed. In 2005, after 183 years in the seaport neighborhood, the fish market relocated to Hunts Point in the Bronx.In addition to the relocated Tin Building, the present site of the Pier 17 pavilion will be home to low-rise retail and hotel buildings and a variety of open spaces.The South Street Seaport was, in the days of transoceanic sailing ships, the busiest place in New York City. From here, Abiel Abbot Low and others sent sleek clipper ships to China, and around Cape Horn to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. This is where New York established itself by 1800 as the nation’s premier seaport, and, following the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal, as bigger than the nation’s next four biggest seaports combined.As steam vessels came to replace sailing ships, new docks were constructed along the Hudson River, and South Street ebbed as a seaport. By the middle of the 20th century, this outer rim of downtown had the Fulton Fish Market, which in the early morning hours was as frenetic as the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The rest of the day, the South Street neighborhood was a quiet, fading backwater, with many evocative old buildings and a few good, cheap seafood restaurants such as Sloppy Louie’s (immortalized in Joseph Mitchell’s 1960 “The Bottom of the Harbor”) and Sweet’s (which features in Max Frisch’s 1975 novel “Montauk”), both located in the easternmost part of Schermerhorn Row, the early-19th-century countinghouses and warehouses along the south side of Fulton Street, between Front and South streets.In 1967, the South Street Seaport Museum was founded for the purpose of preserving several blocks of historic — but neglected — waterfront buildings that were in peril of demolition at a time when so many similar structures had recently been lost. The museum also added several historic sailing vessels, docked at the South Street piers. With a library, exhibitions, a re-creation of a 19th-century letterpress print shop, programs, and publications, the museum quickly established itself among the important cultural institutions of New York.The museum teamed with the Rouse Company in 1980 to establish the festival marketplace. The venture would provide funds for the restoration of Schermerhorn Row and other buildings. The whole project seemed like a win-win.Not often enough noted is that the marketplace’s architecture is generally very good. The Pier 17 pavilion, in particular, is a lovely structure. It was designed, like all the new marketplace buildings, by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Benjamin Thompson & Associates. The Thompson firm also designed Faneuil Hall Marketplace and Harborplace. The ultra-Modernist Thompson designed the Pier 17 structure in a traditional waterfront pavilion mode, with gables and decks and one of the most unexpectedly dramatic interior spaces in the city.By day or, especially, when lit up at night, it’s an extremely pleasing waterfront landmark.Whatever may have gone wrong with the marketplace, it wasn’t the architecture.In any event, the marketplace’s message is passé: Nowadays, no one needs to be told that cities are fun.fmorrone@nysun.com

Reconsidering South Street Seaport

Reconsidering South Street Seaport

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