PORTSIDE NEW YORK INC
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Mission Statement
PortSide NewYork is a living lab for better urban waterways. We bring WaterStories to life. PortSide NewYork connects New Yorkers to the potential of their waterfront, with a special focus on reaching the underserved. We work to change NYC policy so that maritime activity of all kinds—commercial, educational, recreational—is more a part of waterfront revitalization plans. We are currently located aboard a historic oil tanker, the MARY A. WHALEN, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
About This Cause
PortSide produces and hosts NYC’s most innovative waterfront programs PortSide NewYork is an award-winning nonprofit which creates cultural programs on and off our flagship the MARY A. WHALEN and ashore and afloat in industrial spaces, parks, storefronts, on other historic ships and in the virtual realm. Our work is multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and often multimedia. We create documentary programs and also create, co-produce and host cultural programs with water, waterfront and maritime themes (we call them WaterStories) that are not typically found in maritime museums. Why do we do those? We believe in the power of the arts in and of themselves, AND see the arts as a way to bring people to the waterfront and maritime topics. Traditional maritime heritage programs were speaking to the choir; and PortSide wants maritime to have a bigger choir. During the COVID19 period, we are relaxing our rule about WaterStories themes to select cultural groups which are shut down due to lack of outdoor space. If our ship deck can help bring art to the world in crisis, we will try to help. Our work is impactful. PortSide consistently creates “harbor firsts” in New York that then inspire the programs of others. PortSide was founded in 2005 to rethink NYC’s relationship to the harbor by creating an innovative maritime center - a new model for NYC - showing how to combine the working waterfront and public access (busting local zoning conventions) while fostering community development. The policy goal was to make NYC’s waterfront revitalization include more maritime, from freight and passenger boats, to education and culture related to the harbor. This would be an alternative to the trend of putting big box stores and then luxury condos along the shore, and treating the water as just something to look at – meaning esplanades and waterfront parks with no interaction with the water itself. Our focus was the BLUEspace, the waterways themselves, not the land along the edge captured by the word “waterfront.” RED HOOK WATERSTORIES - E-MUSEUM & COMMUNITY GUIDE October 2016, we launched Red Hook WaterStories which tells New York City’s maritime story in microcosm via the fascinating past and present of our peninsular neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. It includes resources on flood preparation, due to the local devastation by hurricane Sandy in 2012 which relates to our resiliency policy work (more on that below). We launched Version 2.0 in May 2018 during the "MARY Month of May" festival honoring the 80th year of our ship MARY A. WHALEN. We continually add and update.