South Street Seaport’s Culture District Converts Stores to Art Galleries

By Joshua Barone
The exhibition "Making Patterns," by the art and technology center Eyebeam, at the South Street Seaport. Ian Lewandowski

Out with Wendy’s, and in with art.

At the South Street Seaport, old tourist-geared chain stores and restaurants that were damaged in Hurricane Sandy are being converted into temporary exhibition spaces collectively called the Seaport Culture District. They will open on a rolling basis through mid-August, with shows running through January.

So far, the roster of partners spans a variety of media: art, architecture, publishing and more. They include marquee names like the Guggenheim Museum and HarperCollins, as well as the AIA Center for Architecture, the American Institute of Graphic Arts and others.

Behind the culture district are the Seaport’s developer, the Howard Hughes Corporation, and the architect James Sanders as curator.

“There’s a special place in my heart for the Seaport,” Mr. Sanders said. “It’s exciting to bring it back to life and transform it in interesting ways.”

He said the idea began about seven months ago, with brainstorming about how to take ground-floor spaces, some of them still empty nearly three years after Hurricane Sandy, and transform them into white-box galleries. Lincoln Palsgrove, Howard Hughes’s director of marketing, said the company was covering the cost of converting the spaces.

Mr. Sanders, with a plan for the Culture District in place, wrangled a list of inaugural partners. One of them, Eyebeam, has already moved in. The art and technology center recently hosted a private preview of its exhibition, a collection of wearable technology. Roddy Schrock, Eyebeam’s director, called it computational fashion. On display are accessories made with 3-D printers and clothing with thermal ink that changes according to the environment.

The idea, for Howard Hughes, is to reinvent the Seaport and change its reputation as primarily a tourist destination. Some of the company’s proposals, such as a luxury waterfront tower, have been met with derision and outright rejection. But Howard Hughes has had better luck with smaller programs like Seaport Studios, a storefront pop-up for fashion designers that opened earlier this summer.