The Fulton Fish Market at 5 a.m. seems like chaos, if you’re not in the fish business. Under two huge metal sheds with their wrought-iron frameworks, finfish and shellfish from every ocean in the world are heaped high on wooden stands, laid out on ice, packed in Styro, submerged in buckets, gutted on metal tables and ready for sectioning. The night is black outside, the seaweedy smell penetrates every sip of air, and everywhere guys in white coveralls with ice hooks or machete-like blades are yelling over the racket, doing the business of this place. Out at the edge there’s a lone coffee cart; its proprietor, a hard-bitten, middle-aged woman with a New Yawk accent hard enough to stun a swordfish, slings coffee faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. Everywhere is the finger-snap ferocity of deals being struck—what, Australian barramundi? Brazilian yellow jack? Look at these, my friend, eight bucks a pound. It’s mayhem, of a very efficient kind.
But if you talk to Peter Neill, you soon realize that this is nothing.
Neill is the president of the South Street Seaport Museum, an institution lodged in a row of 1811 buildings directly across the street from the market; he’s lived a few blocks away, on John Street, for the past 18 years. And under the high-energy fishy grind of the market today, he can see the place as it once was.
“This street,” he says, taking a deft step back to avoid being mowed down by a forklift, “was called the street of ships. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of square-rigged ships and schooners, bowsprits canted out over the street. And all these buildings were filled with counting houses, sail lofts, chandlers—the businesses that served the industry. The streets were filled with a kind of vital loading and unloading, all these commodities from China and Europe being loaded onto wagons to start on the routes across the country—as organized a chaos as the market here this morning.”
Neill, ’63, explains that the entire lower tip of Manhattan was once this way. Ship upon ship upon ship, jammed in close at their moorings, from the Fulton Ferry that Whitman commemorated in verse—ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?—around the southern point of the island and right on up the Hudson.
That vast and vital commerce is in large measure what Neill’s mission at the museum is all about. The SSSM attempts to tell the story of New York’s rise, driven by its role as a port, to become “the first modern world city.” It also works to engage people of all ages in maritime life today through its cultural, educational and hands-on activities, from sailing instruction to ship restoration to onboard marine ecology classes. The goal is dramatic, ambitious and off the museum norm—apt adjectives for Neill himself.
Undoubtedly it’s wish fulfillment, the mind supplying what the eye would like to see, but Peter Neill looks like a ship’s captain. There’s the full, white beard, the high forehead, the barrel chest. There’s even the tie he’s wearing, dotted with tiny seahorses. And then, over everything, there’s the heartiness of his voice, a dramatic baritone so captivating that it can obscure Neill’s sharp analyses both of museum culture and American culture at large.
Neill’s been in the world of not-for-profit cultural institutions for three decades now, but he’s had an unusual career path. First, Neill grew up in St. Louis; before high school, he says, he’d never seen the ocean. He left for boarding school at St. Paul’s in Concord, N.H., in 1956, and senior year he went to an admissions interview for Stanford. It was, he admits, “a warm-up for Harvard, Yale and Princeton,” where 70 percent of St. Paul’s graduates ended up back then. By the end of that interview, Neill was headed for Stanford, where he majored in English and creative writing. “It was the best thing that had ever happened to me,” he says. “I was a Midwestern kid who’d been sent east to get finished; then I was sent west to get really finished.”
Post-Stanford, and following military service and a year and a half traveling overland to India, Neill studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshops. His first novel was published in 1970; two more followed, sporadically. “I don’t know whether [my novels] are very good,” he says with a shrug. “Sometimes I think they’re brilliant, sometimes I think they’re pretentious, sometimes I think—what’s the word? Trepanned?—it’s like somebody cut a hole in the top of my skull and looked into my brain and said, oh my God, quick, put a hairpiece over it just to cover it all up.”
Neill’s books were inventive, nonlinear works—not the sort that sells. He had bills to pay and three children to feed. He was teaching writing at Yale, but adjunct faculty were paid as miserably then as now. “Being a dutiful Midwesterner, I felt I had to do something more. So I thought, I’ll leave this now, and I’ll go out into the world, and I’ll learn something about life, and at age 64 or 65 I’ll come back as Dickens,” he recalls with a laugh. “A life plan! Maybe even a career!”
The maritime world drew him in. After starting as a part-time volunteer, Neill eventually became head of Schooner Inc. in New Haven, Conn. The small nonprofit was devoted to marine conservation education and revolved around a restored two-masted schooner, the J.N. Carter. Neill’s inspiration, now realized on a larger scale at the SSSM, was to spread the vessel’s costs among a number of users. He helped found New Haven’s Harbor School, which bought the services of the boat for its curriculum. That consortium then expanded to include the state university system. “You create your own marketplace,” Neill says. “And you do the same thing over and over again for different and unexpected users.”
From New Haven, Neill was recruited into the maritime program at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The job was pleasant, he says—a lot of canapés at cocktail events in D.C., a lot of jetting around the country cheerleading for the program—but not particularly challenging for him. Then in 1985, SSSM board member Peter Aaron called Neill and asked if he’d be interested in running the place.
The museum, founded in 1967, was floundering at the time, with half its staff laid off. “I’d ask around, and everybody’d say, oh no, bad career move,” Neill says. “Then I’d look around and say, wait a minute, what career? So I went down and stood at the end of the dock and looked at the masts of the ships here, and I said, Peter, you’ve got to be a fool not to take this job. This is the most exhilarating possibility you could ever have.”
These days the South Street Seaport Museum is more robust, though getting it there hasn’t been easy. Its existence as an institution with exhibition spaces—as opposed to a collection of historic ships with some programs attached to them—is a recent development, and it is unusually spread out. There’s a main facility, the $21 million Schermerhorn Row renovation with 30,000 square feet of brand-new exhibition space. Another building on Water Street houses two galleries, the most recent opened last October. New York Unearthed, a dozen blocks away near Battery Park, is the museum’s urban archaeology center, housing 2 million artifacts and a conservation lab. Then there are the two piers berthing the museum’s eight ships. The ships, Neill points out with pride, comprise the world’s largest privately maintained historic fleet.
The museum’s exhibits are as far-ranging as its premises, from a recent show of portraits of artists who’ve lived in the seaport district—Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman and James Rosenquist among them—to an exploration of the maritime history of the American slave trade. A show called “All Available Boats” profiled the maritime people who were part of the mass evacuation from lower Manhattan on September 11. “More people than at Dunkirk,” Neill recalls.
Businesses in Lower Manhattan were devastated by the World Trade Center attacks. Before 9-11, some 500,000 people per year were paying participants in SSSM programs. That number dropped to zero after 9-11; it has now climbed back to around 385,000.
Quite apart from the effect of September 11, Neill observes, “The attendance at history museums around the country is in a kind of exponential decline, and it’s not history’s fault. I mean, there’s no complex of behavior that is more inclusive or more entertaining or more instructive. So why is it that we don’t revere it? In some ways, the appreciation of art—especially if you’ve already been told that this is the object to be appreciated—is a pretty simple transaction. But when you have to go confront paradox, contradiction, failure, foible—it’s a little bit more challenging.”
While Neill may have put aside the extravagant self-expression of his writing life, he’s never put his personality on hold. The urge toward experimentation that drove the novels—the balloon-pricking inclination of someone with little use for the status quo—comes across the moment you start talking with him about museums, how they should operate, what they should do.
As Jim Delgado, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum and former head of the U.S. Government Maritime Preservation Program, says, “One thing you can always count on Peter for is an opinion, but also an opinion that’s grounded in a lot of careful thought. I think the way things are changing in museums now is the way Peter has been moving South Street. More engaged in education. More active in the community, more engaged in outreach.”
Madelyn Wils, chair of Lower Manhattan’s Community Planning Board One, says, “It’s a very hands-on museum, and Peter’s a hands-on kind of guy. He’s lived in this community for years, and he loves this community. He started this wonderful harbor school when he rebuilt the Peking on Pier 16; that was a remarkable accomplishment. He gets people involved.”
Delgado points out that one of Neill’s strengths is that he’s not a “traditional” museum person. “At the same time, he’s been president of the U.S. Council of Maritime Museums and often consults with a number of other museums on planning. His impact goes beyond South Street. Like all bright and opinionated people, he has his detractors,” Delgado says, “but he has an enviable track record—and that makes some people jealous.”
Neill’s vision focuses on what a museum does rather than what it has. “[There are these] conventions that have grown up around museums,” Neill says, “that it’s all about the keeping of the objects, the artifacts, the collection. And that’s all-important. You have to have these things; it’s important for the culture to have these treasures. But to me they’re just tools.”
To mount an exhibition about the U.S. slave trade, for instance, you need physical items that can serve as conduits for the story you’re trying to tell. But the significance of a strip of woven fabric or an iron slave collar lies in its relationship to a human story. Call it the intersection where Neill the novelist flows into Neill the museum director.
Talking about the challenge of bringing history to life inspires a story. When you talk with Peter Neill—or listen to Peter Neill, really—you soon realize that everything brings up something else. Hence, the tale of the tea set:
“There was a time when the New York Historical Society was under some financial distress. They were deaccessioning their collections, and there were things that theoretically weren’t important, and all the not-for-profits and history museums got up in arms and said, well, just give us the opportunity to bid on these things at a preemptive price before the auction.
“I looked at the catalog and there was a tea set, just a creamer and a sugar bowl, by a New York City silversmith. Well, we preempted it—at a price that was astronomical to us—but why? Because we had all the tools and crucibles and family detritus of that silversmith. As an archaeological place, we had his life. But we didn’t have the product in his life. We didn’t have the thing that was then sold off through middlemen to the gentry. Because it was a tiny little set, even the children and the grandchildren didn’t want it; and now the museum didn’t want it. Yet for us it was an absolute treasure because it made this very important link between the fact that while some patrician had it, somebody made it.
“And what about that person? An enormous amount of skill and effort and emotion [went into that work], and hardship and turmoil and failure—and those things fascinate me.”
Hardship and turmoil and failure, and skill and effort and emotion. Sounds like the novelist’s lot. Or the museum director’s. Leaning back in his chair, Neill says, “You know, building an institution is like writing a novel. It’s not poetry. I don’t dismiss poetry as a sleight-of-hand, I understand the intensity of experience that goes into writing a great poem. On the other hand, it is not the same as slogging through a thousand pages of fiction writing. And that’s what [running a museum] is like, in a way.”
Running a museum allows for all sorts of subplots and digressions. While the museum itself remains the heart of Neill’s job, it seems constantly to pump out related ventures: education programs jointly managed with the New York City school district, programs for disabled children, and now, he hopes, a “world ocean observatory,” both an exhibition space and a forum for study of the ocean as a global resource that’s challenged by scarcity and conflicting interests.
“What you discover is that the ocean is very much like history in that it is a constantly changing, dynamic place,” Neill says. “You can discover almost every aspect of human life contained therein. Just the way you love reading a historical novel or a biography of an eccentric or pivotal person, the same thing is true of the people you meet in and around the ocean. There’s the same kind of value determination that takes place when people derive their livelihood—spiritual or physical—from the sea.”
He thinks for a moment and adds, with a playful look in his eye, “Not many jerks, actually.”
Ray Isle, a 1993-95 Stegner Fellow, is managing editor of Wine & Spirits magazine in New York.
