Opening: Maritime History on Display, Including the 1868 Building Housing It

Maritime City features 540 objects over three floors from the South Street Seaport Museum's 80,000 works of art, historical artifacts and archival records. The exhibition concept design is by the architecture firm Marvel. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

From a 22-foot-long 1935 model of the ocean liner RMS “Queen Mary” to the tiniest of ships-in-a-bottle, the inaugural exhibition of some 540 historical objects from the South Street Seaport Museum’s collection goes on display beginning March 12 at the museum’s newly renovated 1868 A.A. Thomson & Co. building at 213 Water Street.

The inaugural show, Maritime City [1], includes a wide range of art, historical artifacts and archival records, including some never before shown from the museum’s holdings of 80,000 objects. It is an exhibition meant to help show how the waterways around the Greater New York area led to the creation of the city it is today, beginning with the Lenape people, referred to by the museum as “the first stewards of the waterways.”

The A.A. Thomson & Co. building, a 12,000-square-foot former metals warehouse, is the Seaport Museum’s final restoration project, part of the 1980 South Street Seaport Historic District master plan undertaken by the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle. “We’ve come full circle by completing this project,” said Beyer Blinder Belle architect Richard Southwick, who was in charge of the building’s restoration. “After all the changes the district has gone through, it is immensely gratifying to watch it become a stronger and stronger destination, and the Thomson Warehouse will continue to play a role in that evolution.” 

By taking the unrestored building “into the 21st century,” Jonathan Boulware, the museum’s president, said in a statement, “Thomson will serve as a new center of gravity for the museum as we approach 90,000 visitors, serve more NYC public schools students, and interpret the mighty and varied maritime city we live in.”

The exhibition is housed on the first three floors of the five-story building. Along with images and artifacts displayed on walls and in glass cases are open flat file drawers that contain such historic items as technical drawings, ship plans, broadsides and lithographs. 

“I have the great luck to work with an incredible art collection and archives,” Seaport Museum curator Martina Caruso told WNYC [2]. “The museum started collecting in 1967 when we opened and never stopped.”