Troubled South Street Seaport Museum reopens

After a three-month revitalization, the financially troubled South Street Seaport Museum has reopened to the public with an exhibition of artifacts and media installations that chronicle New York City's growth since Henry Hudson's arrival in 1609.

The 16-gallery exhibition occupies three floors of the historic 200-year-old Schermerhorn row houses on Fulton Street. It showcases the lives, times and objects of the city's maritime history, from the shrewd Dutch traders to the tenacious shipping magnates to the rugged fishmongers and storefront merchants.

"This is an overnight success from a museum perspective," said Susan Henshaw Jones, president of the Museum of the City of New York, which is operating the South Street Seaport Museum.

"It was totally a liberating experience doing it overnight," she said, adding that museum staff and volunteers worked 17-hour days to create "an atmosphere that was fun and enormously creative."

The Museum of the City of New York took over the museum in November with the help of a $2 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. It had been closed since March.

The museum, which reopened Wednesday and has a year to become financially self-sustaining, will be open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $5; children ages 9 and younger are free.

Among the exhibits is a 22-minute film that encapsulates the city's beginnings as a migration gateway for early settlers, pioneers and 19th century immigrants while highlighting the city's cycles of economic prosperity and poverty.

Henshaw Jones said the exhibits bridge the past and present.

"Handheld Devices" focuses on 19th century manufacturing tools such as leveling planes and fish netting needles -- all artfully displayed inside the museum's brick walls.

In the "Made in New York" gallery, there are examples of handcrafted 21st century furniture, such as a chaise lounge made of cork, Art Deco interior designs of wallpaper hangings and a SoHo-styled abstract sculpture made of sterling silver.

These functional art objects were made in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, said Donald Albrecht, 60, curator of architecture and design at the museum.

"The more I investigated, the more I found," said Albrecht of the city's thriving design and manufacturing industry.

The "Time and Tide" film exhibit simultaneously shows Thomas Edison's first moving pictures of Manhattan's waterfront with Rudy Burckhardt's "Under the Brooklyn Bridge."

Visitor Chet Knapp, 62, of Maryland, said the exhibits gave him "a fascinating history lesson. It was great to see how the city evolved and grew."