Some interesting things at the South Street Seaport Museum today in an exhibit they have going with the Folk Art Museum. Including a history of the Titanic sinking written out entirely on patched together paper napkins. And plenty of scrimshaw, my favorite. A room is also devoted to an exhibit based on the book Mannahatta and showing New York as it would have looked in 1609, in gigantic, beautiful green “photos.” What I liked best though was the part of the museum that preserved the timbers of the old nineteenth century rooming house that used to be housed there, so you could imagine the cramped existence of the seagoing men. Three patterns of tattered wallpaper fell off the plaster walls in strips. There were drunken ghosts there, I swear it.
Jean Zimmerman 