New Yorkers in Exile

[BullNBear52]

At Harbor, Answering an S.O.S.
By ROBIN FINN

SUSAN HENSHAW JONES, the new president of the comatose South Street Seaport Museum and the captain, by default, of its deteriorating fleet of historic vessels, dug the heels of her black pumps deeper into the splintered boardwalk at Pier 16, bracing herself against the November wind pirouetting off the harbor.

“Being on the water in New York City is a great thing for any institution,” she announced, following up with a quick corrective, “or it should be.” Her new job is a little like rescuing a well-located but foundering cultural institution on Fifth Avenue, or at least that is what Ms. Jones, who is also the president and director of the Museum of the City of New York uptown on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, has been telling herself. Been there, done that, still doing it.

At the City Museum, she presides over an eclectic collection of 1.5 million historic artifacts, from Alexander Hamilton’s desk to Bella Abzug’s hats, all housed in an elegant 1932 mansion in the final stages of a $90 million renovation.

Before she was hired, the museum was in limbo: The collection began outgrowing its home in 1938, and a 1988 expansion plan never panned out. The storage conditions for its archive of 52,000 vintage photographs were abysmal; for that reason, other museums were averse to lending their treasures.

A move downtown to the Tweed Courthouse, a prospect dangled by the Giuliani administration, was withdrawn by the Bloomberg administration, leading the museum’s longtime director, Robert R. Macdonald, to resign.

Then a potential 2003 merger with the New-York Historical Society, a sort of consolation prize, collapsed.

Nudged along by Ms. Jones, however, construction on a glass-clad pavilion commenced in 2006, and the museum rallied and raised $80 million of the cost, which has created a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled, 21st-century display space inside the ornate shell of the original landmark building.

Ms. Jones did not only balance the budget, she increased it to $16 million from $4 million, and she made a push for the digitalization of the collection, accompanied by interactive programming focused on all five boroughs. Her managerial and curatorial innovations uptown since 2003 are what inspired Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, to ask her to venture downtown to fix the Seaport Museum and its not-so-fleet fleet. Ship rehab is new to her résumé; the other operational conundrums are not.

“Susan manages in a very special way,” Ms. Levin said. “She gets results. She knows how to take history off the walls and make it come alive. And the Seaport space allows the M.C.N.Y. to branch out and tell a story congruent with its larger mission.”

If she succeeds in resurrecting the Seaport Museum, it will be the third time in Ms. Jones’s late-blooming 17-year career as a “museum person” — previously she worked in urban housing, landmark preservation, her family’s New Jersey manufacturing business, and banking — that she has taken control of a moribund institution, rendered it solvent and made it a player on the cultural map. The difference this time is that she will be running two museums simultaneously.

“I really think I can do it,” she said.

The tidal wave of debt that sank the Seaport Museum’s prior administration was not her problem. Ms. Jones wanted and received a clean slate from the Seaport Museum’s landlord, the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The museum had been in arrears on its rent for a decade and owed $3 million to its former chairman, Frank J. Sciame, who lent it the money last year to cover payroll and operating expenses. Mr. Sciame, who is no longer affiliated with the museum, said in an e-mail that the takeover was “the right thing to do.” Seth W. Pinsky, the Economic Development Corporation president, said the debt had been partly eliminated by write-downs from the museum’s creditors.

Ms. Jones also received a green light from the Bloomberg administration, which sees a thriving Seaport Museum as a cultural anchor for its vision for the neighborhood.

The ships are the portion of the vision that worries her.

“Eleven things that float,” she said, raising a hand to her forehead to smooth down the bangs of her windblown pageboy. She estimates that repairing them all might cost close to $100 million.

Without a windfall from a boat enthusiast with deep pockets, fixing the full fleet is not in the plan. Ms. Jones has already hired her first waterfront director, Jonathan Boulware, whose 20 years in maritime management include a stint as a captain for Calypso cruise lines. His initial job is to advise her which ships to let go of and which to preserve. Intuition tells her that the 1885 Wavertree “is a keeper” but that the German-built Peking is not. She is less certain about the rest.

But Ms. Jones is not the sort to be intimidated by the challenges.

“I was on the search committee that brought her to the M.C.N.Y.,” said James G. Dinan, chief executive of York Capital Management, chairman of the City Museum’s board and a major donor to its renovation, “and with all due respect to the Seaport, the issues we’re facing there are literally a fraction of what she walked into at the M.C.N.Y.

“It was really on life support. The turnaround at the M.C.N.Y. is testimony to her unbelievable mental willpower: she also took the Bloomberg administration, which had really kind of written us off, and slowly got them to buy into what she was doing.”

In Ms. Jones’s office at the City Museum, pride of place belongs to a 1949 photograph by Stanley Kubrick of the boxer Rocky Graziano in a locker room shower, naked yet invulnerable. Presumably his resolute expression reminds Ms. Jones of herself.

She is not afraid to do battle: When she took over at the City Museum, she let go of the “old guard” among the staff and retained very few, notably the chief curator, Sarah Henry, who was hired in 2001 in tandem with the planned move to Tweed. Ms. Henry said it was “particularly important that under Susan’s leadership the museum’s exhibitions, like ‘Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis’ and ‘America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York,’ have helped to reframe civic dialogue in the city.”

Indeed, on Ms. Jones’s watch, the museum, once known as the place with a nice collection of antique toy fire trucks, theater costumes and silverware, has become a place for serious intellectual debate.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, then the architecture critic at The New York Times, called the Moses show “a sweeping, scholarly exhibition that breathes fresh air into one of the most tired, overworked and misunderstood subjects in the city’s history.”

“Ten years ago that museum’s future was up for grabs,” said Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “It was a tired affair. But Susan came along and made it a gallery for social activism and urban dialogue: it’s a transformed operation, a must-stop, must-see.”

Ms. Jones’s husband, Richard K. Eaton, is a federal judge in the United States International Trade Court and a former chief of staff to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan; they have two daughters, both in their 20s. When Ms. Jones was in her 30s, she went back to graduate school and earned an M.B.A. from Columbia University. “It made a new woman of me,” she said of business school, which erased her fears of trying to build a career with just a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar. She worked as a Citibank loan officer and as the executive director of New York Landmarks Conservancy from 1990 to 1993. When her husband’s law career took them to Washington, she spent a decade reasserting the stature of the National Building Museum, a beautiful edifice suffering from an identity crisis.

The question will be whether she can also do that for the Seaport Museum, which has suffered from a dwindling membership, a failure to update its programming and educational programs and, according to Ms. Jones, fiscal mismanagement. “They just plain spent too much money,” she said.

Her conditions for taking on the Seaport Museum, shuttered since February, included an infusion of nearly $3 million in grants from city agencies, the autonomy to reconfigure the staff and replace the board, and full immunity from the inertia and debts of the past.

“The urgency about the decision to come here was that this museum was going under,” she said, gesturing toward 12 Fulton Street, where the museum has headquarters. “What was lacking is focus, and that’s what I can fix as a manager. It is inhumane to run a failed financial ship. It jeopardizes the collections.”

Ms. Jones has trimmed the Seaport Museum staff to 15, and its brand-new board has just seven members. Several members of her uptown staff are, as she is, doing double museum duty.

Ms. Jones expects the Seaport Museum to be back in business by January, and its fleet functional by April. If this takeover succeeds, the two museums may merge. If, after 14 to 18 months, she is unable to produce a turnaround, she and her team have the option of withdrawing their stewardship. The option obviously pains her.

“I’ve been vacillating between these highs of total exhilaration at the opportunity and abject terror and despair,” she said. “I am quite aware that it can’t take 20 years. Hey, we all know I’m 64. But it concerns me that folks are forging ahead determining the future of the city without knowing about its past. We think we have a role here.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/nyregion/south-street-seaport-museums-sos-call-is-answered.html?hp=&pagewanted=print