In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Kurt Schlichting talks about the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

This small barge, listed on the national registry of historic places, which is the last wooden vessel still floating in New York’s harbor, serves as the organization’s physical front. But the goal of the museum is far larger: to educate the public about the city’s outstanding maritime history and its contemporary importance. Schlichting, a  sociologist at Fairfield University, uses the museum to similarly explore this much larger subject, drawing on his recent book Waterfront Manhattan, the first to exclusively focus on the ways New York’s global and unique harbor and shoreline decisively shaped the fate of the city across its 400 years.

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