Seaport Is No Longer Home Port for Iconic Vessel Peking

Peking is tugged from its berth of 42 years at Pier 16 and turned toward Staten Island, where it will remain in dry dock until the spring. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

A beloved landmark of the Lower Manhattan skyline sailed away Wednesday morning.

With the help of three tugs, the former merchant ship Peking, whose four masts towered high above the South Street Seaport for 42 years, left its berth at Pier 16 at 8:50 a.m. and headed to dry dock on Staten Island. There it will be prepared for transport via boat to Hamburg, Germany.

It was in Hamburg that the barque was built in 1911, one of the last of the magnificent windjammers, to transport nitrates and wheat around Cape Horn. And it is there that she will undergo a $30 million restoration for display in the city’s port museum, Stiftung-Hamburg Martim.

Photographs from the last public boarding of Peking, and
the vessel’s departure from the Seaport on Sept. 7.

“The Peking is a remarkable ship. She represents the highest evolution of the wind-driven cargo ships, but she’s not a type that ever called at New York,” said Capt. Jonathan Boulware, executive director of the South Street Seaport Museum, which owns the Seaport’s fleet of historic ships. “And our museum is a story of the port of New York and how it became the City of New York.”

On Sept. 24, the museum’s other tall vessel, the Wavertree, an 1885 wrought iron sailing ship, will move into Peking’s berth following a 16-month, $11 million city-funded renovation.

“A ship like Wavertree is exactly the kind of ship you would have seen here every day of the week at South Street,” Boulware said. “This is the ship that built New York.”

The museum saved the Peking in 1974 when it bought the ship and restored it. Again in need of major, costly repair, but without the funds to make her shipshape, Boulware and the museum have worked for five years to find it a home. “In absence of that home, the alternative may well have been scrap,” Boulware said.

“What makes me really happy about the Peking’s departure is that we have ensured her existence for future generations,” he added. “It won’t be here, but she’ll be alive.”