New Collection Alert: Seamen’s Church Institute Archives

We’ve talked about New York’s origins as a port city in previous New Collection Alerts, however, the Seamen’s Church Institute Archives offers Urban Archive a fresh perspective on the city’s maritime past.

Game Room — 25 South Street- Man with magazine and man in officer’s uniform in chairs in the game room

The focus is on three sites where SCI has offered comprehensive services: 25 South Street at Coenties Slip (1913–1968), 15 State Street (1968–1985), and the International Seafarer’s Center in Port Newark (1961-present). While the initial images on Urban Archive cover a broad variety of locations including photos that provide rare views, de-mapped side streets, and areas now given over to highways and public housing. Future batches from the institute will provide more detail on life inside the service centers at 25 South Street and 15 State Street, including maritime education facilities, dormitories, social events, and religious services. While previous collections have focused on the ships and passengers, the Seamen’s Church Institute Archives shift the lens to those shepherding the ships and their cargo into port: the mariners.

1932 the Great Depression | 10 cent meals in the cafeteria | 1600 Merchant Seamen Housed in the Building

If you visited New York before the late 20th century, sailors would have been a fairly ubiquitous sight on the city’s streets. Though entirely essential to the port’s welfare, mariners and seamen, often first-generation Americans, working-class men, or foreigners, were frequently scorned or taken advantage of by some uncaring or unscrupulous New Yorkers. Founded in 1834 as the Young Men’s Church Missionary Society, the Seamen’s Church Institute initially attempted to serve the mariners’ spiritual and community needs, but quickly grew to provide comprehensive support. From economic relief to education to legal advice, the Seamen’s Church Institute has worked with seafaring folk for almost two centuries.

Game Room — 25 South Street men playing checkers with two spectators in the game room

The Seamen’s archives document that work, and, in doing so, shed light on the lives of the mariners who passed through their doors. A constantly shifting population, these men were a fixture of New York as boats arrived and departed from its harbor. Whether playing games, lining up for meals, or exercising in the gymnasium, selections of a seamens’ life at the port are captured.

Hotel Desk — 25 South Street line of guests at hotel desk ca 1920s

As steamship travel gave way to air and shipping left New York and Brooklyn, the mariners that disembarked onto New York streets with their vessel’s cargo became less and less numerous. Though the sailors are no longer an evident part of the streets that they used to roam, the mariners’ New York is, in some part, preserved in these archives.

American Legion Looking ESE from 69th St Pier, Brooklyn with unidentified people associated with American Legion and USMMA (1950s)

Visit Seamen’s Church Institute page on Urban Archive here for more of their content on Urban Archive, and the Seamen’s Church Institute online archives here to see Port Newark photos along with photos from ships that cannot be geolocated and sailors’ scrapbooks from their journeys around the world in the early 20th century.