Maritime Museum

The Port of History Museum will be open to the public as the Port of History Museum for the last time Sunday, but what happens to its collection of memorabilia and artifacts has not yet been decided. One thing is sure: The stuff can't stay in that circular concrete structure on Penn's Landing because the Maritime Museum is taking over the place and has its own plans. The Maritime Museum has an extensive collection of more than 15,000 items. It also is embarking on extensive renovations to the 16-year-old building.

Woolies, a little-known maritime folk art, are on display this month at Toms River Seaport Society and Maritime Museum. The exhibit encompasses 15 examples of embroidered ship portraits lent to the museum by a private collector and never shown to the public until now, said Patricia Burke, the museum's director. "These truly are works of art," Burke said of the portraits, done on sail cloth. All of the portraits - including an extremely rare one of a pirate ship, circa 1840, flying the Jolly Roger - were done by British sailors from about 1830 to about 1880, when steamships supplanted sailing vessels.

The Philadelphia Maritime Museum appears on the verge of cutting loose from its moorings at Third and Chestnut Streets and setting sail for new quarters in the city-owned Port of History Museum. At least, that's the prognostication of some hands involved in mapping the voyage. Others are not so sure that the city's plan to lease the Port of History building at Penn's Landing to the Maritime Museum for about 85 years will navigate the rapids. "I believe we've reached an agreement that's acceptable to everyone," James Cuorato, the city's first deputy director of commerce, said last week.

The Philadelphia Maritime Museum will sign a lease tomorrow to manage and develop the Port of History Museum, and Maritime officials expect to begin occupancy of the building at Columbus Boulevard and Walnut Street in late July or August. Shortly after moving in, the Maritime will begin extensive renovation of the waterfront building. The Maritime has raised $4 million of the $12 million needed for the renovations, said Diane Eacret, the Maritime's public information director.

City officials are seeking new proposals for most of the long-delayed Penn's Landing development after paring Philadelphia developer Michael Asbell's stake in the Delaware River waterfront project for the second time. Penn's Landing Corp., which oversees development of the waterfront tract, has pulled Asbell's exclusive rights to build a $60 million hotel and retail complex with John Connelly, a Pittsburgh developer who also operates tour and gaming boats. Asbell and Connelly still have the rights to develop a $5 million floating restaurant in the Penn's Landing boat basin, but the city has given other bidders 30 days to submit competing proposals.

The Maritime Museum's bid to gain control of the Port of History Museum at Penn's Landing passed a major hurdle yesterday when a bill to lease it to the Maritime for 83 years cleared a City Council committee hearing. The fate of the waterfront facility - which in recent years has been used by more than 300 civic and cultural organizations, and has been used for free by the city - could be determined Dec. 19, when the full council is scheduled to vote. Some arts groups say they will push to have the vote tabled.

Two auction houses, one transplanted and the second growing, suggest the vigor of the auction market in the Philadelphia area. Both will have auctions of interest in the next few days, the first with the sale of a model ship that once was in the Maritime Museum, the other with a vast New Jersey estate. The transplant is Associated Auctioneers at 601 Baltimore Pike, East Lansdowne, now being run by Joseph Clements Jr. in partnership with Edward Trusello. For years, Clements was associated with Clements' Auction House, a few blocks away on Lansdowne Avenue in Lansdowne.

A new Maritime Museum at Penn's Landing won initial City Council support yesterday after Council tried to resolve fears of arts and community groups that they would be frozen out of the facility. The Maritime would replace the Port of History Museum, which is little used as a museum but is coveted by musicians and other arts groups as one of the few sites in the city for performances. Supporters billed that substitution as a long-awaited step in the development of Penn's Landing.

Chamber music has been a growth industry here with no place to grow. As audiences have expanded for music for small ensembles, the minuscule number of halls suitable for performance has not grown, but shrunk. Performers have their choice of the Ethical Society on Rittenhouse Square, the Academy of Music ballroom, the Academy recital hall, the Walnut Street Theater, the Free Library's Montgomery Auditorium or a church. None comes close to the ideal of an attractive, intimate, acoustically live setting that includes audience comfort, ease of accesss and nearby secure parking.

City Council's proposal to rent the Port of History Museum to the Maritime Museum has aroused serious concerns among groups that fear they won't have access to the building's exhibition space and auditorium. The Port of History's 548-seat auditorium is a matter of extreme concern. For 10 years it has been this musically rich but venue-poor city's only professional recital hall. Access is crucial because its acoustics and sight lines are excellent. And because the perennially debated, recently resurrected Avenue of the Arts proposal - to build both a new orchestra hall and chamber- music-size venue on Broad Street - still looks light-years away.

Call it the many moods of Vince Fumo. In an e-mail war with federal prosecutors, the defense lawyers for former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo released their own selection Friday of Fumo's electronic messages from prison. The defense team said the messages show him to be a different and far more attractive man, or least a more sympathetic one, than the vengeful figure sketched out by prosecutors in their Fumo e-mail dump. In the new round of e-mails, Fumo worries about his weight and his mortality.

Convicted former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo asked for a new trial yesterday, saying that he had just learned that a juror unfairly knew prejudicial facts about him, including that Fumo has once before been convicted of corruption. Fumo's defense team said a freelance reporter for Philadelphia Magazine had discovered this from interviewing members of the Fumo jury after it convicted the once-powerful Democrat in March of 137 counts of conspiracy, fraud, tax violations, and obstruction of justice.

I was convinced that the two grandkids would be absolutely wowed by Baltimore's National Aquarium, the city's signature tourist attraction for almost 20 years and reason enough for a visit here. But we couldn't pry 4-year-old Caroline from Port Discovery, a new children's museum, where she was totally taken by the colorings, cuttings and pastings in what she called the "hearts and crafts" room. And Michael, 10, wants to return just to revisit the Torsk, a World War II submarine, and its neighboring harborside attraction, the Civil War-era USS Constellation (or, as he called it, the USS Constipation)

Woolies, a little-known maritime folk art, are on display this month at Toms River Seaport Society and Maritime Museum. The exhibit encompasses 15 examples of embroidered ship portraits lent to the museum by a private collector and never shown to the public until now, said Patricia Burke, the museum's director. "These truly are works of art," Burke said of the portraits, done on sail cloth. All of the portraits - including an extremely rare one of a pirate ship, circa 1840, flying the Jolly Roger - were done by British sailors from about 1830 to about 1880, when steamships supplanted sailing vessels.

Irvin Borowsky has long been thinking about the effects of violence and hatred on the world at large, and on young people in particular. "My parents escaped from Poland in 1904 and taught me to have a great appreciation to have been born and live in America," said Borowsky, the former chairman of North American Publishing Co., which publishes 13 trade magazines from its Philadelphia headquarters. He spoke last week in the boardroom of his new brainchild, the National Liberty Museum, scheduled to open Wednesday.

Sallie Melnicoff Gross, an author and consultant who spent three decades advancing the programs and interests of the city's cultural institutions and social-service organizations, died Friday after a long illness. She was 52 and lived in Mount Airy. "The commitment she had to her work was tremendous," said longtime friend and colleague Diane Eacret. "No one worked harder than Sallie and there was nothing she would ask you to do that she wouldn't do. " Active in the development of the Sedgwick Cultural Center in Mount Airy, Gross promoted and raised money for the center in recent years.

The swarms of dinosaur-loving kids, yanking their parents along, exceeded promoters' expectations. And profits - once gate totals are added to the souvenir take - are expected at least to cover expenses. But as the month-long megasaurus carnival that was Dinofest came to a close yesterday, the question for city promoters was less about the massive footprint of T-Rex (and the other attractions at the Civic Center), and more about the dino's imprint on this tourist-hungry town.

The 18-foot cat boat is naked, stripped down to its oak ribs, and an unusually dedicated group of men is busy putting it back together again - just as it looked when it sailed the waters of Barnegat Bay some 70 years ago. Once a week since the cold days of March, these men have been gathering in a garage a block from the water here, first taking the Monsoon down to its skeleton and now repairing or replacing the ribs and planking with fresh, strong...