New Captain Puts N.Y.'s Seaport Museum on the Right Course

New York’s South Street Seaport Museum, long plagued by financial troubles and nearly sundered by Hurricane Sandy, is righting itself under a leader with little museum experienc but a background in seagoing and historic ships, writes The Wall Street Journal.

Captain Jonathan Boulware’s work focused on preservation and ship-based education programs before he joined the museum on the lower Manhattan waterfront, founded in 1967 to chronicle New York’s maritime history. He became its interim director in mid-2013, when the museum was taken over by the city — several months after it suffered some $20 million in Sandy-related damage — and became executive director in April.

Mr. Boulware has charted a community- and education-focused course as he seeks to position the museum as a bulwark of lower Manhattan’s rapidly changing historic district, the Journal says. Helping further those efforts, it received $10.4 million this month from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, putting it in a position to renovate its 87,000-square-foot space.