For years, a network of 19th-century rooms that once housed trading companies, warehouses, a hotel and a sailor’s boardinghouse were hidden above a row of retail shops at the South Street Seaport. Now, after a $22 million reclamation project, they are about to be opened to the public, offering visitors a chance to take a giant step back in history to a time when Lower Manhattan’s East River piers were the bustling center of the city’s commercial life.

		Welcome to the South Street Seaport Museum’s new galleries, devoted to an exploration of the city’s maritime history and scheduled to open on Oct. 14. The galleries are housed in Schermerhorn Row, a block of Federal-style brick buildings on Fulton Street, between Front and South streets, completed in 1812 and now owned by the city. When merchant Peter Schermerhorn built the structures, then among the largest in the city, it was a bold speculative venture. Peter Neill, the museum’s director, said the project represented Schermerhorn’s “great moment, his transforming moment,” as one of the city’s prominent early entrepreneurs. The opening of the galleries may well be the South Street Seaport Museum’s own transforming moment—a “coming out” for the institution at age 36. The museum, which has
maintained three small galleries on Water and Fulton streets, is moving into 30,000 square feet of exhibition space in a structure that embodies, as much as any of the artifacts it will contain, what the museum is all about.       “It really is the fulfillment of the founders’ vision—to capture, in the place where it took place, the contribution of maritime enterprise to the growth of this city, the state and the nation,” Neill said. But at the same time as the museum prepares to celebrate the opening of the Schermerhorn Row Galleries, it is struggling to come up with the money to operate them. While other New York cultural institutions have had their city funding reduced, the museum’s subsidy has been cut to zero in the city’s 2003-04 fiscal year, under an agreement made during Mayor Giuliani’s administration. The museum has been trying to convince officials from the Bloomberg Administration and the City Council to reinstate at least some of its former funding, Neill said, but so far in vain. As a result of the loss of city funding and the general economic downturn, the museum cut 20 percent of its staff in the past year and the remainder of the staff took a pay cut. The museum has put up for sale the barque Peking, one of its prize possessions and a Downtown landmark at its berth at Pier 16. The asking price is $12.5 million, which Neill says would be used for an endowment to cover the $750,000 that it costs to maintain the the rest of the museum’s nine-vessel fleet—the largest privately maintained fleet of historic ships in the world—and to finish restoring another tall ship, the Wavertree. In part, the museum’s longtime financial struggles are tied to the way the institution was developed. It was supposed to be supported by profits from the Seaport Marketplace, the mall of shops and restaurants built in the early 1980’s to spur economic development in the Seaport area. But the Marketplace, developed and managed by the Rouse Company, never attracted the hoped-for throngs of tourists and city residents, and no profits materialized. And, Neill believes, city officials have failed to take the museum seriously as an important cultural bastion. “They said, that’s an economic devel- opment project, not a cultural project. Those perceptions may finally be changing, Neill says, bolstered by the successful development of the new galleries. His challenge is to use that momentum to bring the museum some financial security. Last month, he met with representatives of the city’s Department of Cultural affairs to make the case for renewed funding. Neill wants the city to provide $1.5 million of the museum’s $6 million annual operating budget, which he said would be on par with what other museums get. Citing the institution’s extensive programming for students and the public, he said, “I don’t believe we’re entitled to the money. But I think we’ve really earned it. And I’ll put that record up against anybody in the city, for the programs and services we provide.” Sarah Rutkowski, director of government affairs and outreach at the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, said that the gradual elimination of city funding for the museum was part of a deal that the museum made with the Giuliani administration in the late 1990’s. The city provided $5 million toward the construction of the Schermerhorn Row Galleries. (Another $5 million came from the Port Authority, and the museum raised the rest from private sources.) The city is evaluating the museum’s request for more funding, Rutkowski said. Neill argued that agreements change from one mayor to the next. “Let’s start over again, look at what is merited now,” he said. The museum has a history of scraping and clawing its way forward. It was born out of an effort by a group of activists to save Schermerhorn Row when the city wanted to tear it down in the 1960s. Peter Stanford, his wife Norma, and their friend Bob Ferraro met in a drugstore in 1966 and each contributed one dollar toward the museum’s development, Stanford recalled in a recent interview. They opened a bank account with the three dollars and by the end of the year they had 149 members, each of whom also contributed a minimum of one dollar. The museum was chartered the next year, with Stanford as its president, and in 1968 Schermerhorn Row was declared a landmark. The museum slowly built its fleet, acquiring the schooner Pioneer, the Peking, and the lightship Ambrose, and its membership grew by the thousands. But in the mid-1980s, membership dwindled amid internal battles over the museum’s direction. The museum made a comeback after Neill took over in 1985. It had 475,000 visitors annually to its ships and galleries before the terrorist attacks. Now the yearly average is a little over 300,000 visitors. The museum also serves about 40,000 students each year in educational programs at the museum’s galleries, on its ships and at schools. The main entrance to the new galleries will be at 12 Fulton St., with display cases and the admissions desk on the ground floor. Visitors will ride an escalator to a third-floor atrium, from where they will begin touring a network of galleries in the former warehouses. The third floor will display temporary exhibitions, beginning this month with “Africans in the New World—From Captive Passage to Cultural Transcendence,” on the transatlantic slave trade. (See page 49.) Most of the fourth and fifth floors and galleries in a connected building on John Street, which will house the permanent collection, are not expected to open to the public until next fall. The museum’s permanent collection includes paintings and models of trading, fishing and passenger ships; memorabilia from the great ocean liners; pieces of whalebone elaborately carved and decorated by sailors; and objects tied to port commerce, such as printing presses, desks and trading-company ledgers. But in the restored Schermerhorn Row buildings, the rooms themselves tell the seaport’s stories. There, 19th-century graffiti remain on the walls, drawn by workers at a coffee-and-tea importing company. There’s a hoist that was used to lift burlap bags of newly arrived goods and a giant wooden tumbler where the bags were dried after being washed. A section of the Fulton Ferry Hotel, including rooms, a stairway and the sinks and drying racks of a laundry room, has been preserved. “We could have covered all these walls and turned these spaces into white boxes,” Neill said. “But that would destroy the spirit of the building. The ghosts would all die. And the ghosts are here.”