THE AGE OF SAIL IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS; PRESERVING MEMORY AND IDENTITY AT NEW ...

242 Pages·2015·5.9 MB·English

by  Robin Foster

THE AGE OF SAIL IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS;
PRESERVING MEMORY AND IDENTITY AT NEW YORK'S
SOUTH STREET SEAPORT
by
Robin K. Foster

A Dissertation submitted to the
Graduate School - Newark
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Program in American Studies
written under the direction of
James Goodman
and approved by

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Newark, New Jersey
May 2015
© 2015
Robin K. Foster
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Abstract

The Age of Sail in the Age of Aquarius; Preserving Memory and Identity at

New York’s South Street Seaport

By Robin K. Foster

Dissertation Committee Chair: James Goodman

While historic preservation in the postwar era has been conventionally explored
as a response to urbanism and urban development, this dissertation examines the
preservation impulse of the 1960s as a sign of the cultural crisis of that decade.
The postwar urban crisis - culminating in summer riots in 1967 and ’68, student
takeovers, draft card burnings, and proliferating protests against the nation’s racial,
financial and political hierarchies across the country- indicate the crisis of the 1960s was
much broader than simply one of urban crime rates and deindustrialization. This larger
cultural landscape of the ‘60s, its ubiquitous challenges to the political, financial, racial,
and moral foundations of the country, gave birth to an “anguished scrutiny” surrounding
the meaning of the most fundamental tenets of American society. For many, the answer
to the question of the urban crisis was found in the preservation and commemoration of
American origin stories, of maritime-inspired myths, of a time when we were good. The
crisis of the 1960s is the critical landscape from which historic preservation and
commemoration emerged at the South Street Seaport Museum in lower Manhattan, a
commemorative landscape reimagined to recall traditional American hero myths and a
“different breed of men” which seeded the city’s early prosperity during the golden Age
of Sail.
ii
Dedication

To Clem: true public scholar, generous and gracious teacher, once in a lifetime friend.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………… ii

Dedication ……………………………………………………………………… iii

Introduction …………………………………………………………................... 1

Chapter 1: Postwar Pastoral; Miller, Mumford and Rethinking Modernism…….. 27

Chapter 2: Battle Lines Being Drawn …………………………………………… 71

Chapter 3: Past Perfect; History and Identity on the Waterfront ……………… 117

Chapter 4: Battle of the Port; Preservation and Commemoration at
The South Street Seaport ………………………………………… 166

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………. 215

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………. 224

iv
1

INTRODUCTION

Under the impact of modernity, the beliefs, ideals, and traditions that have been central
to Americans and to the character of American democracy – whether religious, such as
Jewish and Christian beliefs, or civic, such as Americanism – are losing their
cultural compelling power.1
- Os Guiness, The American Hour; A Time of
Reckoning and the Once and Future Role of Faith (1993)

The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the
corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae
of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with
scratches, indentations, scrolls. 2
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)

In the spring of 1967, amidst the backdrop of social, political, and cultural
fracturing that characterized those long hot summers between 1966 and 1968, a
grassroots preservation start-up known as the Friends of the Seaport procured a charter
from the State of New York Board of Regents for the creation of the South Street Seaport
Museum. Situated along the East River in lower Manhattan. South Street Seaport was
conceived “to tell the story of the men in ships who built the city’s greatness in the
century that the young American republic came of age.”3 Fundamental to the founding

1 Os Guiness, The American Hour; A Time of Reckoning and the Once and Future Role of Faith (1993), 27

2 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 11

3 South Street Seaport Museum, South Street Seaport: A plan for a vital new historic center in Lower
Manhattan (New York: South Street Seaport Museum, 1969), 1. The South Street Seaport Museum,
chartered by the State of New York on April 28, 1967, was conceived to interpret the vernacular history
2
vision behind the Seaport Museum were two questions: what has our city become? And
what do we want this city to be? Preservation and commemoration of the city’s oldest
maritime district was “intended to weave back into the fabric of city life some of the
warmth and accessibility that have been lost along the way,” and to provide a vital
amenity to the shape that the modern city had become.4 Early writings from Museum
founders and supporters indicate a concern not only with the question, what has our city
become? but query more broadly: who are we? And what have we become?
Echoing “antimodern” sentiments – we will examine this term more closely in
Chapter 1- found in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Law Olmstead, and
Henry Miller, Museum founder Peter Stanford’s plans for the South Street Seaport
Museum were steeped in a pastoral yearning for a more heroic era, one which might
guide the city forward. Stanford asked, “Could one bring an actual fishing schooner back
to teach the slower rhythms of life in this preoccupied, hurrying, noisy environment?”5
The sailing ship represented a remedy to the age-old paradox of the machine in the
garden. Not a noisy locomotive barreling through the pastoral landscape, offending the
senses of smell, sight, and sound; the sailing ship – whether schooner, square-rigger, or
lightship - instead represented a pastoral idyll in the chaos of the machine that was
postwar era New York City. The sailing ship conjured imagery of a nineteenth century
way of life which “involve[d] a direct relationship with the elements…. With doing

and heritage of the East River waterfront surrounding the Fulton Fish Market during South Street’s heyday,
the mid-nineteenth century.

4 South Street Seaport Museum, South Street Seaport, 1

5 Peter & Norma Stanford, A Dream of Tall Ships: How New Yorkers came together to save the city’s
sailing-ship waterfront (Peekskill: Sea History Press, 2013), xxvi
3
things with your hands, with your body, which you don’t do in our society, our
mechanized society.”6
When he christened his own schooner Athena, Stanford recalled the days of the
ancient Greek agora, when the city served as a meeting place where citizens gathered to
talk about “home truths and meanings of the human experience.” The ideals and
functions of the original democratic city-state inspired Stanford during his own socio-
political climate, where “in a time of unrest in city streets and college campuses, we
admired the classic moderation of the Greek civilization, which shone for us like a
beacon.” The cultural dissent and disruption manifesting in anti-war protests, campus
takeovers, and the urban riots of the late 1960s were not relegated to the sidelines of the
Friends’ vision for a restored South Street Seaport but in fact informed its very
foundation. Indicating a critical sensibility was lacking in the present cultural landscape,
Jakob Istanbrandt, shipping magnate and original chairman of the South Street Seaport
Museum, announced “We’re not just going back to the past here; we are getting back to
fundamentals.”7
Just as Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway had done through literature, with
Moby Dick, Billy Budd, and Old Man and the Sea, Stanford and the Friends of the
Seaport sought to bring the romance and heroism of the sea to life. For it was at sea
where “one could deal with honest realities and learn to make one’s way by man’s God-
given gift to learn life’s truths.” A local sea captain insisted, “Schooners like this were
sailed by a different breed of men.” Ours is, historically, a maritime nation, and the

6 Peter & Norma Stanford, A Dream of Tall Ships: How New Yorkers came together to save the city’s
sailing-ship waterfront (Peekskill: Sea History Press, 2013), 443

7 Stanford, A Dream of Tall Ships, p. xxvi, xx, 318, 346, 443
4
seafaring life is the heritage of all Americans. To the Friends of the Seaport, South
Street’s history was an important collective history, one which recalled “a hard life and a
rough one, but it was clean and free and held satisfaction.”8 Clean and free and held
satisfaction. Dignity. Tough, but free.
This is the stuff of traditional American hero myths, and we see these hero myths
play out in maritime-inspired characters from Captain Ahab to Billy Budd to On the
Waterfront’s Terry Malloy to Hemingway’s Old Man Santiago: a different breed of men,
each inextricably tied to the sea. Their relationship to the sea made each of these men
better. Stronger. More dignified. The South Street Seaport Museum extended this
heritage of dignity and strength to the cobbled streets and old brick walls of Fulton Street
and Schermerhorn Row, where Stanford and Friends desired “to summon back a few of
the vanished ships that had brought the neighborhood into being as a rich seedbed for the
whole city” during its hey-day in the mid-nineteenth century.9
Fundamentally at stake in the preservation of the old cityscape was meaning,
during a time characterized by lack of consensus on any meaning, whether cultural,
political, or racial; a time when the country was divided between hawk and dove, right
and left, straight and freak, black and white. With the nation’s escalation into the
Vietnam War raising questions both political and moral, Stanford acknowledged “we
were working to achieve something valuable while we continued to protest the war we
each opposed.” On the home front, Stanford found the counterculture revolution
disheartening, lamenting “the glorification of meaninglessness so fashionable in our time,

8 Stanford, A Dream of Tall Ships, 330, 45, 416, 447

9 Ibid, 147
5
from Andre Gide’s gratuitous act to Andy Warhol’s soup can.”10 Stanford felt he was
speaking for his entire generation; the project at South Street was meant to resuscitate the
value inherent in old brick and cobbled streets of the seaport district, storehouses of
memory that could teach something much needed in the meaningless present and into the
“unknowable future.” Stanford recalled, “The people of our generation clearly, and very
nearly unanimously, felt the same.”11
We must understand, then, that while conventional wisdom explains the
resurgence of historic preservation in New York City following the 1963 destruction of
Pennsylvania Station as a reaction against the physical transformations of the urban
landscape in the name of urban renewal, preservation and commemoration of the cultural
and physical landscape was more deeply rooted in notions of collective identity and
cultural meaning. The Federalist era buildings lining Schermerhorn Row meant
something to the Friends of the Seaport, just as the unfurled masts of a schooner sailing
into South Street meant something. These reminders of the maritime past evoked a
panorama of values found wanting in the present cultural landscape of the late 1960s.

10 Stanford refers to French writer Andre Gide’s irreverent depiction of crime without motive, a senseless
act amounting, in many ways, to hoax. Les Caves du Vatican (1914) is often described as Gide’s definitive
illustration of the ‘gratuitous act,’ in which Gide mocks the clerical tradition as one led by fools. In Les
Caves du Vatican, the gratuitous act of a dispassionate murder symbolizes the foolishness of an indifferent
society, in which one acts simply because one feels like it. American artist Andy Warhol’s now-iconic work
of Pop Art, “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans” (1962), created a sensation in the art world when it first appeared
at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The piece includes 32 hand-traced reproductions of Campbell soup
cans. While the youthful art and film world responded to Warhol’s piece with intellectual curiosity and
critical acclaim for its novelty, most folks over 30 responded with disdain. This was art?? Where was the
evocation of beauty? What of this piece uplifted the human spirit? What on earth did it mean? Taken
together, Stanford’s use of these two examples indicate his – and, according to Stanford, his generation’s -
concern with the proliferating sense of meaningless associated with modernity.

11 Stanford, 48, 278, 189, 277