Preserving South Street Seaport: The Dream and Reality of a New York Urban Renewal District

The South Street Seaport Museum, founded in 1967 in New York City, is part of a larger historical district simply known as "the Seaport," named after the bustling 19th-century port, and is the former site of the world famous Fulton Fish Market. According to Lindgren (history, State Univ. of New York Plattsburgh; Preserving the Old Dominion), the museum was intended as an institution that would remind New Yorkers of their rich maritime heritage. But as the book makes evident, the museum lacked a coherent mission statement that would have enabled the public to relate to it easily as well as to inspire support. Instead, it embarked on various questionable partnerships, notably with the Rouse Company, which launched a misguided real estate venture in the early 1980s that created an unsuccessful Disney-like theme-park mall, eroding the museum's credibility. Combined with a chronic series of financial problems, incompetent staffing, rounds of cutbacks, and unexpected disasters (9/11 and Superstorm Sandy), what remains of the museum today faces a rather bleak future. The author has done exhaustive research in assembling factual evidence of what went wrong; however, he doesn't offer much in the way of satisfactory analysis as to how the museum could have been saved along the way.