Buildings
The Preservation Shipyard is an important part of the museum. It is where traditional tools and techniques are used to preserve the Museum's collection of historic vessels, including a recreation of the ship La Amistad. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the end of slavery in Great Britain, on 21 June 2007, La Amistad departed from New Haven, Connecticut on a 14,000-mile (23,000 km) transatlantic voyage to Great Britain, Lisbon, West Africa and the Caribbean, marking the Atlantic trade and slave route.
The 19th-century seafaring village contains nearly all the types of general and specialized trades associated with building and operating a sailing fleet. They include a chandlery, sail loft, ropewalk, cooperage, shipping agent's office, printing office, bank and others. Also included is The Spouter Tavern, open seasonally and serving "travelers' fare". Each building is used both to show the original activity and to display multiple examples of objects sold or constructed; for instance, the nautical instrument shop displays sextants, nautical timepieces and the like. Demonstrations at the cooperage show how barrels are assembled.
Additional buildings house more exhibits. One is a 1⁄128th scale model of the entire Mystic River area c.1870, complete down to the outhouse behind every residence; a model over 50 feet (15 m) long. Another contains a collection of carved ship figureheads. Also among the museum's buildings is a planetarium that demonstrates how seamen used stars for navigation.
Read more about this topic: Mystic Seaport
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)