Whaling Museum Gets Facelift, New Exhibit

By Jano Tantongco
jtantongco@longislandergroup.com

Cold Spring Harbor’s Whaling Museum and Education Center has a new look.

The final touches were recently put on the renovated museum, renewing the space, and a brand new exhibit allowing visitors peer into life aboard a whaling ship has opened.

“We were very well-loved and used over the years and things honestly started looking pretty shabby, and we realized that we needed to make some improvements so that we could not only look better and function better, but make the exhibits and grounds more accessible for the public,” Nomi Dayan, executive director of the museum, said.

The work started in November 2016, after the museum received a matching-grant award from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation that covered half of the $159,000 expense. Among the improvements were repairs to a leaky roof, replacement of an aged carpeting with planking reminiscent of an aged ship deck and a brand new coat of sailcloth white and soft blue paint.

Cold Spring Harbor was one of three of Long Island’s whaling ports, once economic engines in the 19th century. In 1932, a group of residents commissioned a monument in the form of a boulder — complete with a plaque listing the names of the nine vessels in the fleet — dredged from the harbor to commemorate the area’s whaling heritage.

That boulder was carefully moved to the front of the museum to accommodate for greater accessibility.

The museum is also now equipped with an interactive exhibit, “Thar She Blows,” which captures the essence of what it was like to be aboard a whaling vessel, complete with a hand-painted wall showing a cutaway of the ship, courtesy of the museum’s education manager and artist in residence, Liz Fusco.

“It was definitely a big help for us to be able to do the kinds of improvements that we desperately needed,” Cindy Grimm, assistant director, said.

She added that the new exhibit also features an interactive map that shows the once active whaling ports scattered across Long Island, including the port at Cold Spring Harbor.

Also, there are “smelling stations” where visitors can get a whiff of cooking whale blubber or the odors of the whalers’ quarters, where typically 30 men were “sequestered for three to five years” in a “dank and dark place,” Grimm said.

With the additions, Dayan hopes that visitors will continue to appreciate the history behind Long Island’s place in whaling history and “help broaden the community’s access to the meaningful and wonderful arts and cultural programs to help better connect people with their maritime heritage and their relationship with the ocean.”

But, she added, she hopes that visitors walk away with more than just intrigue.

Dayan said, “The whaling story is a cautionary environmental tale, with lessons that reach far beyond when the whaling industry waned.”