The Age of Sail in the Age of Aquarius;
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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 ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ 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. iii 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