Lettie G Howard and New York City Seaport Museum In Dire Financial Condition

This was sent along by my buddy Bowsprite.  The NYC Seaport Museum hosts the Lettie Howard-The Schooner which many people consider to have the most historical significance to Gloucester.

Her Lettie G Painting-

The first public trickle of info came from this paper no one had heard of, DNA:

http://www.dnainfo.com/20110210/downtown/seaport-museum-struggles-stay-afloat

http://www.dnainfo.com/20101224/downtown/seaport-museum-may-look-sell-off-historic-schooner

http://www.dnainfo.com/places/seaport-museum-new-york

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/arts/design/19seaport.html?_r=1&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all

However, hope exists: Peter Stanford, the founding member of the museum, and a committed group of people who love the ships have presented a marketing and funding plan in an effort to save the neglected fleet.

With programs that include Visiting Ship Programs, education of the history of the vessels and the piers, arts of the sailor, exhibition of local and current nautical artists, and participation in OpSail 2012, the group would accomplish things that the current museum have not done.

Among the proposed is that “…the schooner Lettie G. Howard (1893), scheduled for sale by the Seaport Museum,
be retained as a dockside exhibit ship. The museum had ruled against this
because they felt the wooden schooner, would be damaged by jostling against the
pier due to wakes stirred up by passing harbor traffic. This concern, however,
is contradicted by ten years’ prior experience, between 1968 and 1978, when the
Howard was open to the public at pierside with her hull in worse shape than it
is today.

We recommend that she be placed at a landing stage on Pier 16, with a fisheries
display aboard as she had 30-odd years ago.
The ship fished out of the Fulton Fish Market, in which the public is showing
great interest, and there is a rich trove of photos of similar Gloucester
schooners readily available, including photos of these vessels fishing under
sail at sea, which have been published in a well-known book, Men, Fish and
Boats, to which we hold the rights and the original photos now on file in Mystic
Seaport.”

It has always been the people who love the ships who have kept them afloat.

They have never been needed more right now.