He said that in the 1970s, the museum had more members than any other museum in New York City. He also said there were periods, particularly in the late 1990s, when the museum "was fully solvent with a $6 million or $7 million annual budget, with $2 million in program revenues."  

Boulware conceded that there had been periods of mismanagement in the museum's history, but he also attributed the museum's financial struggles to a "mistake [that] was made in 1967 in the formation of the Seaport Museum under the wrong institution in the city rather than under the guidance of its sister institutions in cultural affairs - and as a result, the museum has struggled a lot over the years."

The New York City Economic Development Corporation is landlord for the South Street Seaport Museum and for most of the Seaport, rather than the Department of Cultural Affairs, which many people believe would have been a better steward.  

Most importantly, Boulware corrected the misperception that the South Street Seaport is a maritime museum. He said, "I am here to talk about a museum and a district. ... The museum was founded in a district that represents the birthplace of New York. ... We have ships not because we're preserving maritime history but because we're preserving the story of the commerce - the cultural exchange - that happened in the South Street Seaport," he said.

The Howard Hughes Corporation has already obliterated some of that history with its installations on Fulton Street where it placed shipping containers in front of the Fulton Market building, covered Fulton Street's cobblestones with artificial grass and brought in a fleet of food trucks and picnic tables during the summer, completely obscuring 202-year-old Schermerhorn Row and the sightlines to the historic ships on the waterfront. Now, a large ice skating rink and an inflatable, plastic tent are parked on the cobblestones.  

HHC's Seaport development proposal includes evicting the South Street Seaport Museum from Schermerhorn Row and creating a 5,000-square-foot home for the museum on Pier 16. HHC proposes to turn Schermerhorn Row into affordable housing, which would mean that the public would no longer have access to the old hotels, the 19th-century industrial machinery and other artifacts that are part of the fabric of the buildings.

Without commenting specifically on what Howard Hughes has in mind, Boulware said of Schermerhorn Row that it was "New York's first World Trade Center. It represents the growth of New York in a way that no other structure does."   

However, the Friends of the Seaport don't see the Seaport District as a historic treasure. Martini said that the "blighted buildings on South Street are a menace to growth, a threat to public safety and an abject insult to the residents and the local merchants on those blocks."  

Lisa Minuta Gorke, one of three women who had organized the Dec. 1 event, said that she and her family were avid bikers. Her vision of the rebuilt Seaport included "a bike path where we can ride past the structure that we're not afraid of who's living there and what's being smoked as we drive by with our five- and seven-year-olds."  

Gregg Pasquarelli and Chris Curry.

Paul Hovitz, a member of Community Board 1 and co-chairman of its Youth & Education Committee, immediately corrected Curry's remarks. "The School Construction Authority is saying that they don't know if they want a school on the water," Hovitz said. "They're saying that it has to go through ULURP [the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure required of any disposition of public property] and they're saying that you only can accommodate the graduating fifth graders from the Peck Slip School" - a small fraction of the fifth graders in the community who would need middle school seats.  

The Peck Slip School alone will have five fifth grade classes, each with 30 or more students. Since a middle school goes from grades six to eight, the proposed school would be overcrowded even before it was built.   

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer.

Both Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and City Councilmember Margaret Chin were in the room, and almost as an afterthought, they were invited to speak. Brewer said, as she has said in the past, that she wants to find a way to have a tall tower and a school, but not right in the middle of the Seaport.  

Chin spoke briefly at the very end of the meeting, and was noncommittal about what she had heard. Afterward, her press secretary, Sam Spokony, said that Chin had not departed in her thinking from her earlier statement following Howard Hughes' initial presentation to the Seaport Working Group, in which she had said "Unfortunately, it's clear that the Howard Hughes Corporation has not fully considered all of the guidelines put forth by the Seaport Working Group. I can't support the proposed tower in its current form, and I can't support the development proposal overall in its current form. There's still a lot of work to be done to make sure this plan truly serves the Seaport community, and we must strongly consider alternatives to the proposed tower."

As part of the ULURP process, both Brewer and Chin would have to sign off on the Howard Hughes development plans, and Chin would play a pivotal role in securing - or blocking - the proposal when it gets to City Council, which has the ultimate right of approval.   

- Terese Loeb Kreuzer   

City Councilmember Margaret Chin with Joy Martini and Maria Ho-Burge, two of the three organizers of a forum on Dec. 1 sponsored by a group called Friends of the Seaport. Behind them, Community Board 1 chair Catherine McVay Hughes talked to Jonathan Boulware, interim president of the South Street Seaport Museum.