Hoping a Little More Hip Can Revive South Street Seaport

Rendering courtesy of the Howard Hughes Corp. A sleek shipping-container pop-up mall at South Street Seaport is expected to draw sleek visitors.

This summer at the almost defiantly unhip South Street Seaport, there shall be pop-up boutiques housed in shipping containers. There shall be outdoor film screenings with lounge-chair seating. There shall be Smorgasbar. And, the lords of artificial weather willing, there may be glitter rain.

The seaport has long been the province of tour buses, serpentine lines for the Statue of Liberty-bound Water Taxi and chain stores like Ann Taylor, along with a collection of historic ships and maritime buildings. But starting Memorial Day weekend, a season of hipper programming called See/Change will try to lure New Yorkers to the banks of the East River, in a bid to speed the seaport’s recovery from the ravages of Hurricane Sandy. More than six months after the storm, almost every ground floor shop is still shuttered, their windows painted to hide the gutting taking place inside.

The centerpiece of the effort - a partnership among the seaport’s developers the Howard Hughes Corporation, the city and several special-events organizers â€" will be a stage erected at Fulton and Water Streets where a carpet of grass will be rolled out in the cobblestone street and rows of wood-and-canvas beach chairs will be set up for weekly concerts and film screenings.

Just south of the impromptu theater, refurbished shipping containers will be assembled into an asymmetrical, two-story structure and apportioned into small retail spaces, the tenants of which have yet to be confirmed.

The top level of the containers will be the newest temporary home for SmorgasBar, an offshoot of the popular Brooklyn Flea munch fest SmorgasBurg. On tap at the beer garden-style space will be Brooklyn beers, drinks mixed with Brooklyn Soda Works beverages and spiked slushies from a machine provided by Kelvin Natural Slush Co., operators of a celebrated food truck.

Rendering courtesy Howard Hughes Corp. Movies will be screened to an audience seated in canvas chairs set up on a temporary lawn.

“The area suffered so much damage we were excited to be bringing life and commerce back to the area,” said Jonathan Butler, co-founder of Brooklyn Flea. “It’s also a chance to elevate the level of food available there. It’s high quality and a little more interesting with a local angle.”

SmorgasBar will snake east on Front Street to Beekman Street, where eight stalls of artisanal Brooklyn-based food vendors will tempt visitors with treats like maple bacon sticks from Landhaus and oysters from Brooklyn Oyster Party.

Further adventures await at Cannon’s Walk at 207A Front Street. The quiet courtyard space known mostly to residents and employees of nearby offices and shops as a place to eat lunch, walk the dog and avoid the tourist bustle is being turned over to an “event production/experiential marketing agency” from Washington, Brightest Young Things.

Svetlana Legetic, who runs Brightest Young Things, said she looked forward to converting the place into a “little surprise jewel box space where anything could happen,” including “weird little special dance parties” and perhaps a glitter-spewing balloon canopy.

“Whenever you stop by there, something would be going on and you might not even know what it was going to be,” Ms. Legetic said on Tuesday. “What if one day we wanted to just put up vintage hammocks?”

Pier 17, the hulking suburban-style indoor mall across the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive from the seaport, will also stay open this summer even though it had been scheduled to close in June for major renovations - in part to help merchants who lost the whole Christmas season to storm damage, Hughes officials said.

Set-up for See/Change has begun â€" the area for the containers has been cleared and blockaded. But on Tuesday, it was mostly business as usual at the seaport, which bills itself as the 26th most visited tourist attraction in the world â€" tied with the Great Wall of China. Mobs of tourists obscured their faces with cameras, the clicks of lens shutters lined up almost in synch with the East River currents lapping up against the tall-masted ships.

“We just this minute got off of the bus,” said Barbara Charette, who had come from Florida with her husband for a guided tour of the city. The seaport was the first stop. “We’re going to ride one of the ships.”

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Tourists took in the sights at Pier 17 on Tuesday.