A hundred years of San Diego's seafaring history may be getting a makeover. Officials with the Maritime Museum of San Diego, home to the iconic Star of India, are making headway on a plan to redevelop its site, which has been located along the Embarcadero for nearly a century.
The iron-hulled barque built on the Isle of Man first put to sea in 1863. According to the operators of the museum, the Star of India is the oldest active sailing ship in the world, beginning its life dockside in San Diego nearly a century ago and undergoing a restoration that was finished in 1963.
Sixty years later, museum president and CEO Raymond Ashley and his crew want to berth the Star and her fellow ships out on new gangways extending as far as 650 out from the Embarcadero, separated by a new 14,000 square-foot two-story museum. Tourists and pedestrians will still be able to see the USS Dolphin submarine, steam ferry Berkeley and the other historic ships, thanks to the glass facade of the museum.
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There's a disconnect between the museum and the public, as Ashley sees it.
"Being a museum — people understand that it's something inside of a building, right? And you go in, and there's all these galleries with these different things," Ashley said. "We don't have a building. The only building we have is the ticket building if you walk up. Everything else is on the ships…. So right away, people are confused with what they're looking at with the definition in their minds of a museum."
Other elements of the redevelopment plan, which the Port of San Diego voted to advance this week (final approval has not yet been granted), include nautical exhibits and a sit-down restaurant for ticketholders operated by the Cohn Restaurant Group.
"It's to give us things we don't have now, like a theater, a classroom, a signature cafe and exhibit galleries that address a really important historical narrative that goes back 60,000 years, and that's the story of human migration over the oceans," Ashley told NBC 7 on Thursday morning.
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Ashley said the redevelopment will also serve to protect the ships, which can take a beating when large wind-driven waves bounce off the pier and batter the boats when the water heads back in the other direction.
The museum, which typically sees 150,000 visitors a year, hopes to double that figure, Ashley said, with all the new additions and improvements.
Currently, admission to the museum is $20, a price that, with adjustments for inflation, Ashley hopes to maintain despite that big bill for construction, which he said he expects will be offset by private donations and public funding. He said the museum has already raised around $9 million for the redevelopment and does not anticipate needing to take on any debt to make the project hit the water.
