Pier & Slip

The South Street Seaport and the Lower Manhattan waterfront.

Pier & Slip is an independent guide to the Seaport district. It is not affiliated with the South Street Seaport Museum, the Howard Hughes Corporation, any business in the district, or any previous website at this address.

The historic district

Designated in 1977, after a decade in which the whole thing was very nearly cleared.

The South Street Seaport Historic District covers roughly eleven blocks around Fulton, Front, Water and South Streets. It was designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1977, protecting the largest concentration of early nineteenth-century commercial architecture left in Manhattan.

Schermerhorn Row

The centrepiece is Schermerhorn Row on Fulton Street — a block of brick counting houses built in the early 1810s on landfill, for a merchant family, to handle the trade coming off the ships outside. Georgian-Federal in style, with the later addition of upper storeys and a mansard roof, it reads as one continuous building and effectively is.

These were offices, warehouses and, later, hotels. They survived because the port moved away and nobody had a reason to knock them down — the neighbourhood's decline is the reason its architecture exists.

Why it nearly went

By the middle of the twentieth century the district was derelict. The Fulton Fish Market still operated, but the buildings around it were empty and the land was valuable. Serious proposals existed to clear the whole area for towers.

The preservation campaign that stopped this ran through the 1960s and 70s and produced both the museum and the eventual landmark designation. The compromise — development rights transferred elsewhere in exchange for preservation here — is why the district survives surrounded by much taller buildings.

The Fulton Fish Market

The market operated on this waterfront for well over a century and was the reason the district smelled the way it did until 2005, when it moved to a purpose-built facility at Hunts Point in the Bronx. The Tin Building, which housed part of it, was later dismantled, moved and reconstructed as a food hall.

What to look at