Located in lower Manhattan along the East River waterfront, the South Street Seaport provides a pivotal connection to New York City’s early days as a center of maritime industry. Indeed, the city’s settlement and growth were inextricably linked to its success, and this history remains embodied in the area’s low-scale, early 19th century commercial buildings, as well as its historic piers and streets, complete with historic Belgian blocks. The area around Peck Slip was for centuries a Native American trading destination; its proximity to Long Island and the presence of a cove made this a natural landing point for canoes, linking footpaths on either side of the East River. Settlers of New Amsterdam took advantage of this geography by establishing the colony’s first official ferry service in 1642, linking Brooklyn to what became Peck Slip. The marshy shoreline was once peppered with inlets that became docks and wharves for the shipping industry, and the ferry service allowed for the transportation of agricultural goods from Long Island, spurring the creation of one of the city’s first farmers’ markets. In 1647, the Englishman Isaac Allerton constructed a warehouse here, apparently to store Virginia tobacco being shipped to Europe. The banks of the cove were filled in and extended to ease loading and unloading from the ships’ sides. This marked the beginning of the landfilling process, which extended from Pearl Street to South Street, forming the foundation of the low-rise “Seaport” district. The locations of the slips are discernible today as extra wide streets right at the edge of Manhattan, like Peck Slip. Despite lagging behind Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston for much of the 18th century, by 1797, South Street Seaport was the nation’s leading port. Several factors contributed to its success, including the opening of a trade route between New York and Guangzhou, when the Empress of China embarked on its maiden voyage in 1784. Soon after the Revolutionary War, the British re-established trade with the United States, and determined New York to be the most ideal export location. These international voyages aided the city tremendously in becoming a global force in maritime commerce. The 1825 completion of the Erie Canal opened shipping routes between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes, further cementing the city’s importance as a maritime trading center. The Seaport experienced a building boom at this time, and many of these structures still exist, providing today’s visitors with a clear reading of the area’s past as an early 19th century maritime neighborhood. Its range of buildings was largely designed in simplified forms of the Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate and Romanesque Revival styles. Only a minority of early stores and warehouses were the work of professional architects, but by the late 19th century, architects including Stephen D. Hatch, Richard Morris Hunt and George B. Post, had designed buildings here. The second half of the 20th century brought much change to the Seaport, with efforts at urban renewal and its transformation into a tourist-friendly “festival marketplace”. In 1972, the South Street Seaport Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (expanded in 1977). The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the South Street Seaport Historic District in 1977, followed in 1989 with the designation of the South Street Seaport Historic District Extension. The buildings in these historic districts date from a period of roughly 200 years, and serve to tell a rich and complex story about New York City’s roots.

Tin Building Pier 17 at South Street between Fulton and Beekman Streets Berlin Construction Co., 1907; reconstruction: Wank Adams Slavin Associates 1995; reconstruction: SHoP Architects, 2016- The Tin Building site hosted the Fulton Fish Market from its inception in 1835, originally housed in a small wooden shed, which was rebuilt in 1848. In 1869, the Fulton Fishmongers Association constructed a more permanent building, though still made of wood. That structure was moved to Pier 18 in 1894 (since demolished), and the Tin Building was constructed on the site in 1907. Modeled after the 1869 building, the neo-Classical design of the structure consists of a corrugated metal façade with decorative two-story sheet metal pilasters. The building was largely destroyed by fire in 1995, but was reconstructed by Wank Adams Slavin Associates. In 2005, the Fulton Fish Market, which occupied both the Tin Building and the New Market Building, moved to Hunts Point in The Bronx, where it continues to operate today. In 2016, the Tin Building will be rehabilitated into a seafood-themed market. HHC plans to relocate and reconstruct the building about 18 feet southeast of its current location as part of its Pier 17 revitalization. SHoP Architects plans to restore historic features that disappeared in the 1995 fire and repair damage sustained during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. The Tin Building is located in the New York City and State and National Register of Historic Places South Street Seaport historic districts.

"Manhattan’s major waterfront area in the late nineteenth century was located in the Fourth Ward, a district that formed an apron around the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1885, the Fourth Ward contained 30 acres of tenements that housed around 17,000 people. The area had been awash with cheap groceries, rat pits, and stale beer dives for years, and due to the growing population of transient sailors, prostitute traffic thickened exponentially; at this time in New York history, the Fourth Ward was, as historian Timothy Gilfoyle describes it, 'the most significant and the poorest waterfront zone of prostitution.' But the waterfront was also the centerpiece of an international trade city, signifying plurality and opacity. Significantly, the district appealed to no one ethnicity, class, race, or gender. Ethnically cohesive neighborhoods, or 'ghettoes,' would only emerge when jobs and industries became associated with specific ethnic groups–garments for the Jewish, cigars for the Bohemians, etc. But through the 1870s and ’80s, the East Side waterfront region of New York, though perhaps mainly Irish, was still composed of workers and unemployed groups that largely allied themselves with trade and the lifestyle of the wharves rather than with any particular language, religion, or national origin." For more on the Fourth Ward Waterfront, check out this article by Robert M. Dowling in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.