From Standard To Remnant

From the 1930s, postcard nostalgia about the “days of the Square Rigger”:

“Stokes” in this case is Isaac Newtown Phelps Stokes, who wrote the definitive book, in six volumes, on the physical and visual history of New York City up to the early twentieth century: The iconography of Manhattan Island. The Stokes Collection is, at least in part, the material that I.N.P. gathered during his research.

The ships on the left are tied up at the South Street piers south of Maiden Lane, and are a mix of passenger and freight. There were no passengers terminals at that time, so you got off a ship into the craziness of barrels and bales stacked up on the street. The buildings on the right, on the west side of South Street, were all industrial. Some were warehouses serving the docks, some had ship-related industries. (The word “loft” in NYC usage generally started as “sail loft.” Sail lofts were big open spaces for sewing sails and turned out to be useful for a lot of other uses.)

From 1912 (twenty or so years before the first postcard above) is a contemporary (i.e., thirty or fifty years later) image of South Street as seen from the Brooklyn Bridge:

Steamships have invaded the docks. The two nearest to us, with their pretty white superstructures and many windows, were probably coastal passenger ships serving New England or the south. But there were still plenty of sailing ships tied up here. And the line of old warehouses and lofts along the west side of the street hasn’t changed at all. The biggest difference between the two photos is invisible: the center of shipping had moved from the East River to the Hudson, to get more space for ships and to get slower currents. The warehouses and lofts survived long enough to be designated as landmarks and repurposed as museum space because the East River dock facilities were not upgraded.