City mulls over new uses for restored maritime building.

The Battery Maritime building had been abandoned for nearly half a century, its hunks of iron and steel cladding being swept into brackish tides of the East River and its empty waiting room stacked with dead DOT files when, in 2001, plans were set in motion to restore it.

The $58 million dollar exterior restoration project at the base of Whitehall Street is nearing completion, but the New York City Economic Development Corporation is still looking for some way to fill it.

The only ferry to Governors Island operates from Slip 7 of the Maritime Building, and its completion should overlap with the development of that site. A request for proposals was issued early this year for interior use of the building--which includes the 35,000 s/f Grand Hall and some use of ferry slips 5 and 6--and is anticipated to include a great food hall or creative arts venue, such as Pikes Place in Seattle. Ferry slips will also be made available to the East River ferry and private water taxi services.

The city has yet to confirm when the winners of the proposals will be announced. Yet the beauty of the building taking shape at the base of Manhattan provides the architects who worked on the project with the tangible results of their labor.

"It's wonderful to see it being brought back, especially knowing that it is structurally sound and it will last for so long," said Richard Pieper, director of preservation at Jan Hird Pokorny Associates, the architectural firm based in Manhattan selected for the work and collaborated with construction firm Tishman

The Beaux Art style Maritime building was designed by Walker and Morris in 1908, and is currently the only surviving ferry terminal of the many that lined the waterfront during that period.

The building's fifty year hiatus, which began in 1958 when its ferry service between Manhattan and Brooklyn was terminated due to lack of interest, presented far more ascetic challenges than restorers could imagine.

All restoration work for the architects paled compared to the nerve wracking task of documenting all 8,800 pieces of cladding of various shapes on the buildings exterior, to determine what could be salvaged and what needed to be replaced. A large percentage of the exterior was salvageable and other pieces were replicated at a foundry in Alabama.

Some of the pieces were so ornamental and precious, like the pierced anchor recesses in the center of the rope, the architects kept even those that could not be restored. Preservationists held tight to the original building, constantly analyzing the old building plans. Matthew Mosca, a paint analyst from Baltimore spent many days crawling over scaffolding, scratching samples off all parts of the building, to analyze the original color scheme.

Several samples were found from a period of time dating back from 1908 until 1958 when the building was ultimately abandoned. The architects agreed to use only the color scheme from the original building--which ranged from olive to forest green on the double arched facade, and salmon pink on the inside.

The copper manside roof which replaced a standing seam roof in the 1940's was repaired along with a skylight roof and seven large copper panels engraved with decorative rosettes and cross braces. The large stained glass windows under the skylight of the 55,000 s/f interior passenger waiting room were also salvaged.

"We are thrilled with the way the building looks now, and are very excited that the building will once again have a public function and that people will once again be able to use and experience the building," said Judy Bernard, project manager with the DEC.