A Nautical Institution, If You Can Find It
Our Town downtown
January 8, 2007
An out-of-the-way storefront with a steadfast customer base
On the off chance you find yourself on
New York Nautical, which used to get some walk-in customers when it was on West Broadway, has become a strictly word-of-mouth institution.
And an institution it is, according to Smitty, who’s been working there almost twenty-six years and has been the store’s manager for three. “I’m an institution!” he’s yelling on the phone when I walk in. “You didn’t know that?”
The store’s gap-toothed shelves are lined and piled with nautical books that anyone might read, (“Shipwrecks Around Cape Cod”), nautical books that you probably wouldn’t read unless you were pretty damn interested (“The Cruise Ship Phenomenon in North America”), and nautical text books and pamphlets so technical that you can’t help but feel sorry for the ship captain studying for his license renewal exam (“Summary of Corrections, 2006 Charts, East Coast of North and South America”); collectibles and gifts (the most popular pre-Christmas items were chart weight compasses and rigging knives, and the most expensive item in the store is a Chelsea ship’s clock, at $2,400); and hundreds, maybe thousands of nautical charts that cover every body of water in the world (“Don’t call them ‘maps!’ warns an employee. ‘Smitty will kill you.’”).
Before it moved here, to its practically unmarked location on this little-traveled Tribeca side street, New York Nautical did business at its 140 West Broadway location for 30 years, and before that – “well now you talkin’ ‘bout history,” says Smitty. Suffice to say that the store’s been around for about eighty years.
The funny thing about Smitty is that despite his encyclopedic knowledge of his maps – er, charts – and equipment, he doesn’t sail. Ever. “No, I’m a land lover,” he says with a dismissive shake of the head.
“I’ll put it this way. A lot of people come in here that do sail, want to take me with them. I don’t get in no small boats. If it’s not a cruise ship, I’m not going. I’m just not a boat person. Besides, I don’t swim. Chances of a cruise ship going down are pretty slim.”
Smitty was hired as summer help in 1980 to fill in for someone out on vacation, but he didn’t leave when that employee got back. “That was because about two weeks there, I basically knew, not all the ins and out, but the most common ins and outs,” Smitty recalls. “You had a lot of people that did work here, they didn’t have what I had. That’s why I’m still here.” He had an aptitude for quickly measuring distances on maps, and “most importantly, you name an area, I basically knew what chart number to go and find. When it would take someone ten minutes to find it, it took me one.”
The fact that he can’t stand boats doesn’t seem to hurt Smitty’s credibility. Eighty-five percent of the customers who come once, come back, Smitty estimates.
The thirty or so customers who come in on an average day are about evenly split between commercial mariners and recreational yachters. But there’s also the occasional artist – Smitty gets maybe two a week – looking for a chart to hang up on the wall. “They’re not to the quickest to work with,” and they present a different type of challenge for Smitty: he’s got to think about the charts – land masses and bodies of water, islands and piers – in terms of aesthetics.
Then there are the law firms. “We get lots of law firms, yes,” Smitty nods, staring straight ahead at the model of a sailboat. “Sometimes there’s an accident somewhere, and they need to have a chart from that area, information on that area, and they know if they come to me, I’ll get it for them fast.”
