This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
As an institution devoted to telling the story of the sea, the Mystic Seaport Museum has an inherently close relationship with water. Sitting along the Mystic River in southeastern Connecticut, its campus spans 19 acres and nearly 150 structures, including exhibition spaces and a re-creation of a 19th-century New England coastal town. Along the museum’s waterfront, it has an active seaport and a marina where roughly 900 boats dock annually.
For nearly a century, the organization has maintained a harmonious relationship with the river. Flooding caused by storms, high tides and heavy winds occurred occasionally, but were not cause for great alarm.
However, with storms becoming more severe and sea levels expected to rise substantially in the coming decades, the museum faces a daunting challenge: how to stave off the inevitable. Planning has begun to protect the museum’s history and properties, but the scope of the effort, as well as the costs, are immense.
Nevertheless, the museum may have little choice.
“Twenty years ago, there might have been an inundation a few times a year,” Chad Frost, principal of the landscape architecture firm Kent and Frost, which has been working with the museum for two decades, said in a video interview. “Now, we’re seeing degrees of flooding on a monthly, sometimes weekly, occurrence.”
The museum’s location has made it especially vulnerable. It was constructed on the site of an 1830s shipyard built by three mariner brothers, George, Clark, and Thomas Greenman. They, like other entrepreneurs in the booming seafaring community of Mystic, took over low-lying and marshy lands whose gently sloping banks and proximity to the Atlantic Ocean were opportune for shipbuilding. When the museum was established in 1929 as the Marine Historical Association, a steady expansion began, with land filled in and bulkheads added along the river.
“This kind of development was happening along the entire Connecticut coast around 100 to 80 years ago,” Frost said. “Now we know that fill settles over time. Add to that the fact that we didn’t have the foresight to know about climate change and rising sea levels — areas once habitable are being forced to adapt.”
Today, the majority of the campus is in a FEMA-designated flood zone. Among the highest points — at just 14 feet above sea level — are the museum’s offices, which were originally the Greenman brothers’ homes.
“It’s a testament to how forward-thinking these mariners were,” said Shannon McKenzie, the museum’s vice president of watercraft operations and preservation, in a video interview. “They knew the river would be a threat long before people were concerned about sea level rise.”
Flooding often submerges walkways throughout the campus, preventing visitors from accessing buildings and experiences. Some structures, especially those along the waterfront like the Thomas Oyster House — which operated in the thriving oyster distribution hub of New Haven from 1874 to 1956 and was donated in 1970 and placed on its current site on a museum pier in 1984 — also become flooded.
About five years ago, museum officials took the first steps toward finding a way to protect the site. They started by inviting officials from the nearby towns of Groton and Stonington. “It was the first time their town planners had a conversation about the rising river,” McKenzie said. “It was a great eye-opener for us that we could be a service to the community by addressing this now.”
Working with architects from Kent and Frost, the museum in 2020 began to assess the campus. Using FEMA’s guidelines, which determine how high buildings must be above flood elevation, the team created several maps to understand the risks now and as sea levels rise.
The Connecticut Institute for Resilience in Climate Adaptation, or CIRCA, estimates that levels will rise 20 inches by 2050. While based on tidal data from nearby New London, which is experiencing sea level rise considerably faster than the average global rate, Frost noted that all models predict a 20-inch increase at some point. “It might not be 2050, but this isn’t a question of ‘if,’ but rather ‘when,’” he said.
The study revealed that a 20-inch rise in sea level would make smaller, albeit more frequent, storm surges more destructive. “It’s very alarming,” Frost said. “With this rise, a 10-year storm would be significantly worse than a current 30-year storm. And, as we’ve seen, these so-called 10-year storms are actually happening almost annually.”
How to adapt is a complicated question. There are four main coastal strategies: fortification, building barriers to resist sea level rises and floods; accommodation, returning areas to marshland; elevation, raising buildings or the land; and migration, moving to higher elevation.
The museum plans to use a combination of the four. Because its marina is active, it is not possible to move all operations away from the waterfront. The museum has a collection of more than 500 historic watercraft, many in that part of the campus. It includes the Charles W. Morgan, an 1841 whale ship that the museum said is the oldest remaining of its kind. Moored along the museum’s Chubb’s Wharf, the nearly 114-foot-long ship is a crucial part of the visitor experience. Guests can walk its deck and explore its claustrophobic interior, once filled with blubber, oil and grimy sailors.
The museum can, however, move some buildings, and there is precedent for such an intervention. On the coast of Rhode Island, the Newport Mansions society was forced to move its Chinese Tea House 75 feet inland in 1977 because of a deteriorating sea wall. Other Newport structures, like the Hunter House, are under threat, prompting ongoing discussions.
However, the locations of some buildings are as valuable as the objects inside them, limiting the options for climate resilience. The Mystic Seaport Museum has sought ideas and support, focusing on community outreach, engaging local leaders in planning, hosting architecture students and organizing conferences to discuss issues and solutions.
The museum has assessed each structure’s elevation and condition and created a system to rank importance. Historic buildings in their original context are deemed of highest value. Next are buildings like the Thomas Oyster House that have been moved from their original context. Of lowest value, and therefore with more latitude in terms of preservation, are modern constructions built to appear old.
“We now know which buildings we need to protect in their current sites, which ones we need to move higher, and which ones to potentially get rid of,” McKenzie said. “It might seem surprising to let buildings go, but this campus has evolved continuously over the last almost 100 years, and making realistic decisions to adapt to sea level rising is part of that. It’s a story that connects all of us, whether you call it climate change or not.”
As it begins this work, the museum is facing another hurdle: the significant cost, likely tens of millions of dollars. It plans to split the project into three phases while fund-raising in between, a process expected to take decades. By then, the Connecticut resilience institute’s expectation of a 20-inch sea level rise by 2050 may come to fruition.
“Is the Seaport moving with urgency? Yes, but it will take time to convince donors and permitting agencies that this work needs to happen, and it needs to happen now,” Frost said. “This is a slow building crescendo that gets worse the longer we wait. The fact that the museum is acting before the crescendo builds is inspiring.
“The clock is ticking, but you’ll never finish if you don’t start, and we’ll all have to start soon enough.”
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