Pier & Slip
Eleven blocks of early nineteenth-century counting houses sitting under a highway, next to the East River, in the middle of the financial district.
The South Street Seaport is the oldest surviving cluster of commercial buildings in Manhattan, and one of the strangest places in the city — a preserved sailing-era port two streets from skyscrapers, with a shopping pier on one side and a Brooklyn Bridge on-ramp on the other.
It has been rebuilt, re-themed and re-argued about roughly once a decade since the 1960s. What survives underneath all of that is genuinely remarkable: Schermerhorn Row, the ships, the cobbles, and a street grid that still follows the shape of the original slips.
What is here
- What's on — how the district programmes its year, and where to check
- The historic district — what was preserved, and why it nearly wasn't
- The piers — Pier 17, Pier 16, Pier 15 and the waterfront edge
- The ships — the historic fleet, and which you can board
- Getting here — closer to more subway lines than almost anywhere
A note on the name 'slip'
The streets around here are called slips — Peck Slip, Burling Slip, Coenties Slip — because that is what they were. A slip was a narrow inlet of water between two piers where boats moored to unload. They were filled in during the nineteenth century and became streets, which is why they are wider than the alleys around them and why they run at odd angles.
Once you know that, the neighbourhood's layout stops being random and becomes a map of a vanished shoreline.