South Street Seaport: the harbour that took its dead

New York · United States · Urban site

South Street Seaport: the harbour that took its dead — New York · United States · Urban site

Where New York began as a port city — and where drownings, wrecks and disease were constant.

South Street Seaport is where New York began as a port city. Along the East River, sailing ships, warehouses and sailors' quarters were crowded together, and both the city's wealth and its dangers passed through here. A harbour of that size had constant death: drownings, ships lost in storms, accidents on the quay, diseases that arrived with the vessels. At the corner of Fulton Street and Pearl Street stands the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse, raised in memory of those who died when the Titanic sank in 1912.

Harbour districts collect stories the way the quay collects fog. Along the old cobbled streets around Front Street and Water Street, where the sailors' lodgings and taverns stood, folklore speaks of footsteps in the attics of the surviving nineteenth-century houses, of a sailor's figure seen in the haze by the quay who then vanishes, of the sound of rope and timber from ships that no longer exist. To stand at the Titanic memorial lighthouse at dusk ties together centuries of death at sea: the named of 1912 and the countless anonymous the harbour took long before.

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Where is South Street Seaport: the harbour that took its dead located?

South Street Seaport: the harbour that took its dead is in New York, United States.

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Accounts are drawn from local folklore and visitor reports.

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