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Leading off our Turkey Week rundown of prominent stalled projects in New York City is Seaport Residences, a 60-story residential skyscraper at 161 Maiden Lane along the border of Lower Manhattan’s Financial District and the South Street Seaport District. Designed by Hill West Architects and developed by Fortis Property Group, the slender 670-foot-tall tower, originally dubbed One Seaport, was planned to span 200,000 square feet and yield 80 condominium units with interiors by Groves & Co. Ray Builders was the last general contractor to work on the beleaguered project, which stands on a narrow site bound by South Street and Maiden Lane, directly across from the FDR Drive and the East River.

The skyscraper has languished with no progress for the last three years, and there are no indications of work resuming anytime soon. After breaking ground nearly a decade ago, the project famously unraveled in early 2019 over reports that the reinforced concrete superstructure was leaning three inches to the north, leading to a public spat between Fortis and the original contractor, Pizzarotti LLC. Despite its lean, the structure was deemed safe and curtain wall installation resumed later that year under the supervision of a new contractor, Ray Builders, but by our update in September of 2020, significant portions of the glass envelope had been removed for unclear reasons.

Today, the superstructure looms as a forlorn skeleton over the East River waterfront, its future in doubt.

Fortis Property Group originally acquired the property for $64 million was anticipating a sellout of $272 million on the condominium units. It remains unclear if and when work on Seaport Residences will resume.

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Permits have been filed for a six-story residential building at 1152 Lafayette Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Located between Broadway and Bushwick Avenue, the interior lot is near the Knickerbocker Avenue subway station, serviced by the M train. Richard Zavlyanov of Diamond Development Group is listed as the owner behind the applications.

The proposed 60-foot-tall development will yield 10,483 square feet designated for residential space. The building will have ten residences, most likely condos based on the average unit scope of 1,048 square feet. The masonry-based structure will also have a cellar and a 32-foot-long rear yard.

Robert Bianchini of ARC Architecture + Design Studio is listed as the architect of record.

Demolition permits have not been filed yet. An estimated completion date has not been announced.

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Spanish multinational financial services company BBVA has announced plans to relocate its headquarters to Two Manhattan West, a recently completed 58-story office skyscraper in the Manhattan West complex in Midtown West. The move is set to be finalized by the end of 2024.

BBVA’s new headquarters is set to occupy roughly 74,000 square feet across two floors in Two Manhattan West. The skyscraper offers modern amenities, including fitness centers, conference facilities, and outdoor terraces, and is strategically located near major transportation hubs and city attractions.

A key aspect of BBVA’s move is the alignment with its sustainability goals. Two Manhattan West, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is LEED-Gold certified and powered entirely by renewable energy, specifically run-of-river hydropower. This eco-friendly approach is in line with Brookfield Properties‘ commitment to transitioning its U.S. office portfolio to zero-emissions electricity by 2026.

With BBVA on board, Two Manhattan West has now achieved over 80 percent occupancy, joining other major tenants in the area and demonstrating the building’s appeal to leading global firms.

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South Street Seaport Museum announces the February selection of the Seaport Museum Book Club is Here is New York by E. B. White. The free event will be held on February 26, 2024, at 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport, 4 Fulton Street. seaportmuseum.org/bookclub

In honor of the season of love, the Seaport Museum Book Club invites you to delve into the heartwarming selection, Here is New York. This timeless piece by E. B. White serves as the quintessential love letter to New York City, capturing its essence with perceptive, humorous, and nostalgic insights during a stroll around Manhattan in 1948.

Join this lively discussion on White’s masterful work, and rediscover your affection for the city. Recognized by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and hailed by The New Yorker as “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city,” this publication promises to rekindle your love affair with the vibrant and ever-evolving cityscape. Don’t miss the chance to share your thoughts and reflections on this literary gem with fellow enthusiasts. You don’t have to read the full essay to enjoy the event––everyone is welcome!

Here is New York is available for purchase at most bookstores. Register for the January meeting of the Seaport Museum Book Club today to receive a 10% off discount code for online orders of the book at McNally Jackson Books. mcnallyjackson.com/book/9781892145024

About the South Street Seaport Museum

The South Street Seaport Museum, located in the heart of the historic seaport district in New York City, preserves and interprets the history of New York as a great port city. Founded in 1967, the Museum houses an extensive collection of works of art and artifacts, a maritime reference library, exhibition galleries and education spaces, working 19th century print shops, and an active fleet of historic vessels that all work to tell the story of “Where New York Begins.” seaportmuseum.org

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An enterprising father and son in Dresden, Germany, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, found success in the 19th century hand-blowing glass models of marine invertebrates and selling them to universities and natural history museums around the world, from New England to Tokyo. Harvard and Cornell bought around a thousand, in total, by mail order in the 1870s and 1880s.

As it turns out, many of those same types of invertebrates were also traveling the world — and they still are, transported by maritime traffic, clinging to the hulls of ships and riding in their ballasts. Some of those native European creatures, modeled in glass long before terms like invasive species and biofouling were coined, are now thriving in Stonington Harbor in the Mystic River Estuary, off the coast of Connecticut.

Those well-traveled species are the inspiration behind “Spineless: A Glass Menagerie of Blaschka Marine Invertebrates” at the Mystic Seaport Museum nearby, through Sept. 2024. Included in the rare loan of more than 40 delicate Blaschka models, mostly from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, are several whose pesky counterparts are blanketing nearby docks and pilings.

It’s the first time that the Blaschka models have been given so much historical context, from 19th-century sailors’ journals and jars of preserved specimen to zoological illustrations that informed the Blaschkas. The museum even included a few related contemporary art works.

“It’s a way for us to authentically talk about ocean health within our mission and within our site,” Christina Brophy, senior vice president of curatorial affairs at the Mystic Seaport Museum, said while sitting out on one of its sunny decks last month. The largest maritime museum in the United States, it’s better known for whaling vessels than ecological research. But one of the show’s curators, James T. Carlton, director emeritus of the Williams-Mystic Coastal & Ocean Studies Program of Williams College and the Mystic museum, has been scraping ship hulls since 1982 and cataloging his findings to record the area’s changing biodiversity.

The Blaschka glass models are fragile and rarely travel. But the museum was able to secure a wide variety, including sea anemones, octopuses, squids, tube worms and sea squirts.

“We were looking for species that had both a local story and a global story, species that have been spread around the world by ships for centuries,” said Carlton, who collaborated with the museum’s curator of collections, Krystal Rose.

In an era before scuba diving, underwater cameras, or mass-produced textbooks, the Blaschkas’ lifelike sea creatures were the gold standard of marine zoology teaching models. Invertebrates could not be taxidermied, and collected specimen lose their color and form when preserved in jars, as we can see from the many on view here, including some dating to the 19th century.

Leopold (1822—95) and Rudolf (1857–1939) offered around 700 marine invertebrate species, which they sold through catalogs like Ward’s Natural Science Establishment of Rochester, N.Y. Created by the process of lampworking — glass blowing using an open flame — and then painstakingly hand-painted, the models were designed to look more realistic than beautiful. But they are works of art, with their multiple layers of glass and fine frills, fringes, suckers and tentacles. (They rarely appear on the market but a Portuguese man o’war brought around $13,000, and a jellyfish, around $20,000, at a Christie’s London auction in 2019.)

“They were a more or less accurate rendering of the species,” said James Hanken, a professor in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, who spearheaded the cleaning, restoration, and display of that institution’s 434 Blaschka models in the early 2000s, after finding them stored away in dusty boxes.

“The Blaschkas were very, very, specific about their parts,” said Elizabeth Brill, a glassworker and marine biology field technician who restored Harvard’s collection (and Cornell’s before that). “They knew exactly how long each tentacle should be, from one species of jellyfish to the next.” Brill restored the one jellyfish on view, which is missing some of its fragile tentacles (replicated by the Blaschkas by coating wires in glass).

Leopold, who hailed from Bohemian glassworkers, started out making jewelry and then glass eyeballs both for humans and taxidermy. He also made stunning glass flowers, producing more than 4,000 with his son for Harvard. What’s surprising is that these two artists in landlocked Dresden could have replicated marine species so accurately.

Leopold did in fact glimpse live jellyfish in all their glass-like luminosity years before he started making them, while sailing across the Atlantic to the U.S. in the early 1850s. By the late 1870s he and his son had acquired a seawater aquarium and ordered live animals that came wrapped in seaweed from marine stations throughout Europe. (Much of what we know of them comes from their archives at the Corning Museum of Glass.)

Zoological illustrations were also essential. Early on, Leopold emulated drawings of anemones by Philip Henry Gosse, the Victorian naturalist and collector of marine species known as the inventor of the modern aquarium (and for trying to reconcile his creationist beliefs with his scientific findings). Later, the Blaschkas borrowed illustrations from Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist and skilled artist who cataloged many of the thousands of marine species pulled up by the HMS Challenger, a British ship that spent three and a half years, starting in 1872, gathering data from the ocean’s depths.

“There was so much documentation of marine invertebrates in the 19th century,” Rose said. “Citizen scientists were walking the shores noticing these things.”

This escalating fascination with the sea helped fuel the Blaschkas’ success, “along with Darwin’s publication of the ‘Origin of Species’ and explorations going to all kinds of places,” Hanken said.

With those explorations, of course, came marine creatures as invasive as the humans leading them.

The exhibition includes several models of invasive sea squirts, or tunicates, named for the leathery tunic-like sheath that protects their soft bodies. They tend to grow in clusters and create a slimy blanket that can befoul aquaculture and create drag on ship hulls. And then there are the living ecosystems they disturb.

“We generally don’t like to see invaders,” Carlton told me while watching recent video footage of some of the sea squirts swaying in the tidal surge in nearby Stonington Harbor, where they blanket docks and pilings. “They could replace or displace a native species. And it might have a cascade effect.” The most visible, lightbulb sea squirts, named for their translucent white tubelike forms that seem to glow, are native to Europe but were discovered in Long Island Sound in the early 2000s. The Blaschkas’ version is encased nearby and shows three colorless glass tubes sprouting from a base, each filled with tiny glass coils that seem like precursors of fluorescent light bulbs.

The Blaschkas’ models brought attention to the ocean’s changing biodiversity when a Cornell professor, Drew Harvell, set off on a scuba diving journey in 2013 to see how many live versions of the Blaschkas’ models she could locate. Coral reefs damaged by pollution, blast fishing and ocean warming were among her finds. A book and film documented the project.

Warming waters are also enabling nonnative species to survive where they previously could not, Carlton said. What we can do, as individuals, he said, is “try to clean as well as possible whatever we’re moving or transporting” that might have associated species tagging along.

Once again, “our eyes on the shore are citizen scientists,”Rose said, pulling up an app on her phone, inaturalist, a nonprofit organization that’s building a crowdsourced database detailing where and when living things appear. “Anyone can report a species sighting, and then it gets confirmed by others,” she said. Carlton added, “one step ahead of science.”

Peak season for the Port of New York and New Jersey has arrived. Not only did the port take the top spot for containers moved in July, but it was the port’s highest monthly total since October 2022. A total of 725,479 TEUs were processed in July.

Rick Cotton, Port Authority executive director, tells American Shipper it was extremely gratifying to see the strong performance that made the port the busiest in the nation for July.

“The Port of New York and New Jersey’s strong performance in July as the peak shipping season gets underway underscores our business partners’ confidence in the East Coast’s biggest port to move their goods quickly and reliably,” Cotton said. “Our deep relationships and collaboration with all links of the regional supply chain continue to reap tangible benefits for our stakeholders who have retained their business here in New York-New Jersey even as the impact of softening global trade is felt elsewhere.”

Based on current port data compiled by American Shipper, the East Coast and Gulf ports are strongly favored over West Coast ports. The Port of Los Angeles announced a drop of 26% in twenty-foot equivalent units processed year over year in July. Compared to June, there was a drop of 148,744 TEUs processed in July. The ports of Savannah, Georgia, and Houston both recorded increases over the same time frame. The Port of Houston was up year over year with its July container processing.

New York and New Jersey Port officials tells American Shipper they saw a 40% increase in shipments of apparel, toys, games and sporting equipment. The port also moved 9.4% more cargo this July compared to July 2019.

The strength of trade arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey and the Gulf and East Coast ports continues to flow through the Panama Canal despite the current congestion. The Panama Canal is a critical trade link for U.S. shippers heading to Gulf and East Coast ports.

The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) tells American Shipper, “The Canal continues to be the preferred route for the container carrier segment which has been minimally impacted by the adjustments to draft and transits associated with the measures to conserve water.”

“New York/New Jersey, Savannah and Houston are the most important ports in the U.S. Gulf/East Coast, accounting for almost 60% of total imports, and moving 70% of Eastern Asia imports in July 2023,” the ACP added. “Currently, all of the 18 liner services deployed in the Asia — U.S. Gulf/East Coast route via Panama Canal call at either New York/New Jersey, Savannah or Houston. The Panama Canal has maintained a strong participation in this trade lane — with vessels capacity up to 16,000 TEU — because of the value offered in terms of connectivity, distance, and time”.

Even water conservation measures that have increased wait times upwards of two weeks for some vessels to pass are not dissuading shippers from using the preferred water route.

The ACP added, “Vessels that book in advance, such as containerships, are transiting as scheduled through the Panama Canal, without significant delays.”

The U.S. is the largest user of the Panama Canal, with total U.S. commodity export and import containers representing about 73% of Panama Canal traffic. Forty percent of all U.S. container traffic travels through the canal every year, about $270 billion in cargo. U.S. energy and agriculture also use this waterway to transfer goods.

In 2021, David Chang decided to move his hugely popular Momofuku Ssäm Bar to the Seaport, a neighborhood in transition — one associated with tourists, finance, and the absence of Fulton Fish Market following its 180-year tenure. Two years later, the restaurant has announced on Instagram that it is closing at the end of the month. The last day of service is September 30.

“We will always be grateful for the teams past and present who made Ssäm Bar such a special restaurant over the past 17 years,” reads the Instagram announcement, citing its roots in the creation of the global brand, Momofuku. “It is hard to overstate the impact Ssäm Bar had on Momofuku and beyond.” Eater has contacted Momofuku for more information on the closure.

Ssäm Bar relocated to the Seaport after 15 years in the East Village. The restaurant’s lease was expiring; instead of renewing it, the team moved the restaurant into a space that was home to another Momofuku restaurant, Bar Wayō, which opened at the Seaport in 2019. The move was announced early in the pandemic in tandem with the closing of the Korean Italian restaurant Nishi, open since 2016.

When Ssäm Bar opened in April 2021, the new location felt like “a monogrammed polo shirt of its formerly raffish self,” Eater critic Ryan Sutton wrote of the move. While the menu and space saw many iterations over the years, in the most recent one, “the group has managed to keep its creative culinary soul intact, slinging gelatinous raw crab platters, Korean-Lebanese wrap sandwiches, and buttery imitation crab rolls in places where one might otherwise expect a $70 strip steak.”

Momofuku Ssäm Bar opened in 2006 in the East Village at 207 Second Avenue, near East 13th Street, two years after the debut of the scrappy Momofuku Noodle Bar, a restaurant that was huge in shaping how New Yorkers dined. This, too, became a quintessential restaurant, despite its ever-changing menu that helped drive New Yorkers’ quest for new menu items from old favorite restaurants.

Two years after it opened, the New York Times called Ssäm Bar “the cornerstone of the Chang legend,” wrote then-critic Frank Bruni. “It justly enshrined Mr. Chang as a chef who went further than any of his peers in wedding serious, sometimes challenging food and an ultra-casual, spontaneous dining ethos in tune with unbound times.”

The move to the Seaport tracked with an infusion of money into the Momofuku brand in 2016, marking a shift from opening in a residential neighborhood to billion-dollar developments like Columbus Circle, Hudson Yards, and the Seaport’s Pier 17.

After the restaurant closes, Momofuku will be down to three restaurants in New York City: Noodle Bar, Ko, and the fast-casual, made-for-the-mall Bāng Bar, which opened in Time Warner Center in 2018. There’s also a Momofuku in Las Vegas and Majordomo in Los Angeles.