“Moving the market was a real loss to that neighborhood, and then moving the Tin Building is death by a thousand cuts.” “What’s happened over all over the decades in the seaport is a commodification and Disneyfication of its history, and the market continuing as a functioning fish market till 2005 can communicate some of that history to a visitor,” said Tara Kelly, the group’s vice president of policy and programs. Preservation groups were divided on the project’s merits.Īlthough most of the building’s original fabric had been lost over the decades, the Municipal Art Society maintained that the structure should have been restored in situ using as much of the original material - or surviving vintage replacement material - as possible. The move also opened up views of the Brooklyn Bridge from the East River esplanade. The developer’s main rationale for constructing the new Tin Building nearly 11 yards from the site of its progenitor was to raise the structure one foot above the 100-year floodplain, which would have been impossible on the original site because of the looming obstruction of the F.D.R. Roosevelt Drive viaduct, which in 1954 was built rather rudely just two feet above the market building’s cast-iron-and-steel canopy on South Street. The original Tin Building had long hunkered in the shadow of the Franklin D. Intended to attract New Yorkers, including the many nearby millennial residents, the 212,000-square-foot structure contains a rooftop event space, broadcast studios and restaurants like the Fulton by Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
In 2013, Howard Hughes demolished the touristy Pier 17 shopping mall and replaced it with a sleek new four-story Pier 17 Building designed by SHoP Architects, which opened in 2018. “It’s completing the missing hole in the middle.” The historic district boundary runs jigsaw fashion through the pier, with the Tin Building lying within the protected area. “The Tin Building is really the linchpin for the seaport, connecting the historic district and this historic building out to Pier 17,” said Saul Scherl, the president of the New York tristate region for Howard Hughes. Indeed, depending on one’s views on the city’s eternal struggle between development and preservation, the new Tin Building represents either the keystone of a revitalized Pier 17 and South Street Seaport district or the loss of an important physical vestige of the city’s thriving past as a maritime commercial center.
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The current Tin Building project has not been free of controversy. It is more Son of the Tin Building than the Tin Building itself. In addition to being moved eastward, the building has also been raised six and a half feet to protect it from flooding. Yet this three-story edifice is not the reassembled Tin Building but rather a brand-new structure - a meticulous replica that incorporates 92 salvaged elements of the storied relic but is otherwise composed of new materials on a new site, with a new interior configuration and new entrances on its eastern facade. With fish arriving first by schooner and sloop and later by refrigerated truck, the venerable wholesale market grew to be the largest of its kind in the country, its nocturnal fishmongers hawking their wares through the wee hours as workers with hand trucks wended their way among alternating pockets of light and shadow on South Street.Īfter a complete reconstruction of Pier 17, a building of the same size and profile as the Tin Building is currently taking shape there. Thirteen years after the fish market was shuttered and moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx, more than 300 pieces of the utilitarian, neoclassical marketplace were salvaged and cataloged for reference or reuse by the Howard Hughes Corporation, the leaseholder of Pier 17 at South Street Seaport.įrom the early 1800s until its closing in 2005, the bustling, odoriferous Fulton Fish Market was an integral part of the working East River waterfront that helped make New York City the powerhouse mercantile center of the United States.
The 1907 Tin Building, one of two surviving major structures of the celebrated Fulton Fish Market and the only one of the pair within a designated historic district, was painstakingly disassembled in 2018 and is now being recreated 32 feet east of its original location. When is a historic old building not a historic old building? When it’s a historic new building.
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