Beginning March 2025
Tickets Now Available | Wednesday–Sunday | 11am–5pm | 213 Water Street | Pay What You Wish
Pre-book your tickets today for Maritime City, a highly-anticipated forthcoming exhibition that highlights how New York City, as we know it today, arose from the sea. Throughout the extensive three-floor exhibition, objects on view underscore how the city’s identity as a global capital of culture and finance is rooted in its origins as a seaport.
As you walk through 540 deliberately-selected objects from the collections and archives of the Seaport Museum, you will discover how the waterways, people, and industries of the Greater New York area—including all the boroughs, Long Island, and the Lower Hudson Valley—led to the creation of a truly diverse city. By sharing the material culture of New York and its people, the objects on display highlight stories of the working class people employed by ships, shipping lines, and other local industries throughout history, as well as the emigrant workers and immigrant families that came through the port as their first stop in America.
In Maritime City, you will experience a celebration of communities that have come together to grow New York. For four centuries, the port of New York has connected people to the world through the exchange of goods, ideas, languages, and cultures. Indigenous Lenape people were the first stewards of the waterways, creating trade routes connecting Manahatta to the sea. In the 17th-century European colonists, enslaved Africans, and migrants built on this foundation to give birth to a restless and ambitious city. Later waves of immigration, would grow a world capital formed by its oceanic links to the world. Just as the history of New York is woven from many stories, Maritime City employs artifacts to present a tapestry of a global metropolis shaped by the sea. The South Street Seaport Museum interprets these origins, a museum for a maritime city.
Maritime City is scheduled to open to the public in March of 2025. Reserve your tickets now to secure your place and join the Seaport Museum’s mailing list to be one of the first to receive updates and announcements. Access to the exhibition galleries requires walking up six steps, with wheelchair access available via a platform lift. Each of the three floors with public offerings are accessible by elevator.
Want to learn more about Pay What You Wish General Admission tickets? Visit the FAQ page for more details.
More About the Exhibition
Housed within the historic A.A. Thomson & Co. building—a historical artifact in its own right—Maritime City showcases 540 deliberately-selected objects from the Museum’s Collections of 80,000 works of art, historical artifacts, and archival records representing a wide range of time periods, themes, and materials. Objects on view include long-held artifacts and archival materials not previously seen by the public, alongside new objects that highlight the present and future of the Museum’s collecting. With such a wide array of items on view, this all-ages exhibition promises something for everyone.
Highlights within this expansive exhibition include:
- The 22-foot long 1935 builder model of the celebrated ocean liner RMS Queen Mary
- Paintings by the renowned maritime painters James Edward Buttersworth, Antonio Jacobsen, and Gordon Grant
- Unusually large turn-of-the-century glass plate negatives by the photography studio of George P. Hall & Son—including one of the fireworks display for the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge
- A rare surviving wheel from the French ocean liner SS Normandie
- Recently acquired items such as a contemporary fine art photograph by artist Jeremy Dennis, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, and more to come and explore.
- Fascinating miniatures and uniquely small artifacts that create a “Corner of Curiosities”
