INTERVIEW: South Street Seaport Museum has adapted during these COVID times
Photo: The South Street Seaport Museum offers a monthly sea chantey and maritime music program. Photo courtesy of South Street Seaport Museum / Provided by Michelle Tabnick PR with permission.
The South Street Seaport Museum, much like other museums around the world, took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, but brighter days appear to be on the horizon. The Downtown Manhattan institution is gearing up for a busy summer — a time of increased programming, more visitors and also the ability to reflect back on the tumultuous past.
Captain Jonathan Boulware is the president and CEO of the museum, which consists of a fleet of ships: the 1885 schooner Pioneer, the 1930 tugboat W.O. Decker, the 1885 tall ship Wavertree and the 1908 lightship Ambrose. He recently exchanged emails with Hollywood Soapbox as his museum’s monthly sea music event, dubbed Sea Chanteys and Maritime Music, was set to engage yet another virtual audience. This singing event, which kicked off in April 2020, features both professionals and amateurs, according to press notes. There are performers from New York City, the United States and around the world. The next one is scheduled for Sunday, July 4 at 2 p.m.
The museum, which is located at 12 Fulton St., is committed to sea music and even has its own maritime singing group. The New York Packet was established more than three decades ago, and today they sing aboard the Wavertree vessel in the historic seaport district of New York City. They carry on the traditions of chantey singing — honoring the tunes of “long voyages spent months living together in close quarters with no outside entertainment.”
Questions and answers with Boulware have been slightly edited for style.
How has the museum fared during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Like many of our sister institutions, the South Street Seaport Museum was hit hard by COVID-19 and by its financial impact. We closed, as did many of our colleagues around the city and around the country in March of 2020, having planned for an ambitious year of in-person programming. Of course all of this was put to a quick stop by the pandemic. There are some bright sides — we were able to pivot pretty quickly to robust virtual programming. This including things like moving our sea chantey programming online, which may seem counterintuitive to have a singing program online, but we were able to do that, and we saw pretty quickly that we had 10x, 20x, 25x the number of participants on those programs. We also were able to be of service to our New York City public school partners — folks that normally come to the Seaport Museum to do programming in-person and count on that as a piece of their curriculum. And we were able to produce some of those elements online and provide them free of charge to our public school participants.
What are you most excited about as more and more people start going back to the museum?
So much! One of the things we did last year that resulted in some pleasant surprises grew out of a kind of a quirky bit of decision-making. We opened Wavertree last fall for a series of days — a much shorter run than we’re doing in this season — and the puzzle was actually, “How do we charge admission when we don’t really know how these viruses communicate?” So, what started as a “How do we actually collect money?” and our decision not to charge admission at all, was initially driven by the pandemic. This turned into something that was really pleasantly surprising. So the obvious outcome was that our visitorship went up. You remove cost as a barrier to participation, and more people will attend. But what was unexpected was, first of all, we were seeing lots of New Yorkers, lots of people from the tri-state region, and we were seeing people from geographically diverse spectrums and population — economic diversity, gender diversity, racial diversity. We saw New York show up and aboard the ship, and we’re seeing that again this year. This ship is New York’s flagship. It represents the city becoming what it is, and it’s really great to be able to share that with New Yorkers. That’s what I’m most excited about.
What can audiences expect from the monthly sea chantey program?
Well, sea chanteys, which are work songs that sailors used to make drudge work easier, more entertaining, are part of this. We also have a broader category called “Sea Music.” But these are things that are commonly done in-person and often in unison. So, how do you unison singing in a virtual format? Well, the answer is you cannot. If anyone has tried to sing Happy Birthday to someone over Zoom, you will quickly discover that it ends up atonal and completely out-of-sequence. So, what you can’t expect is a lot of unison singing. What you can expect though, which is truly magical, is people who are singing songs from their living rooms, from their backyards, from their kitchen tables, having prepared them for this event, and these people are rank amateurs and professional singers and everywhere in-between. You can expect people to be calling in to offer these songs to the group from all over the country and all over the world. We had people in recent sings be from all different time zones in the U.S., multiple places in Europe, and even people from the southern hemisphere. What you can expect is something that you actually can’t experience anywhere else. It’s really quite lovely.
Why do you think sea chanteys have become so popular in recent years?
I think that even before the pandemic-induced, Zoom-intensive technology world, that we have become very attached to our screens. And I think there’s something about singing in unison or singing in some way that touches on some larger theme that speaks to people’s desires or something authentic. We saw a viral trend come out with the song “The Wellerman” — not a sea chantey by the way, but a ballad. And “The Wellerman” kind of kicked off in TikTok during the pandemic. That’s the most recent bloom of it, but the reality is that people have been increasingly interested in this kind of music and related kinds of music a lot in recent years, and I think it’s people that are hungry for something that they can touch that feels like it’s real. That’s what it feels like to me.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The South Street Seaport Museum, located at 12 Fulton St. in New York City, preserves and interprets the history of New York as a great port city, according to an official press release. Click here for more information.
