The Great Ship WaverTree Returns

A ship saved by a city, a museum saved by a ship 

- John Clarke

Capt. Jonathan Boulware, executive director of the South Street Seaport Museum in lower Manhattan, has two memories that loom large when he contemplates his tenure.

One is Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “It was haunting,” he says. “It was one of our darkest hours.” It was also right when the museum had managed an against-the-odds comeback from the 2008 recession and the 9/11 attacks on the nearby World Trade Center, which had made downtown New York City a living hell.

As Sandy approached, three days from landfall, Boulware and his staff watched and waited for storm models to firm up. A small army of 60 volunteers trucked in extra mooring lines and secured the seaport’s vessels nearby at Pier 16, home to the Wavertree, Peking and Ambrose, among others. “We focused on the fleet and used a Pythagorean theory applied to the tension,” Boulware says. “Wavertree needed some slack without getting too wild in her berth.”

They sandbagged the front of the museum outside on the sidewalk at 12 Fulton St., stacking them three high. “That was downright comical,” he says. “It was laughably inadequate. No quantity of sandbags would have stopped that storm surge.”

Boulware and two staffers stayed in the museum overnight as Sandy made landfall. They weren’t there to prevent damage, he says, but as first responders to assess the post-hurricane wreckage.

Then it happened. “It was that particular cocktail of wind forces and tidal surge,” Boulware says. Inside the museum’s front lobby, he could hear a rushing coming from the basement. Lower Manhattan was flooding. Boulware and his staffers went up to the roof and looked out. “One minute the streets were dry, the next they were wet.”