FOUNDERING: The Monitor, built in Brooklyn, sank off North Carolina in 1862. (AP)
A Brooklyn couple says their plans for a Civil War battleship museum are being held hostage, but they refuse to abandon ship.
Janice and George Weinmann have dreamed of building the Greenpoint Monitor Museum, dedicated to USS Monitor, the Navy’s first ironclad battleship.
But after a decade, the city is still threatening to take their land for a park.
“We’re not going to give up. We’re not going to accept any eminent domain proposal,” said Janice Weinmann, who, along with George, has lived in the area her whole life.
The Weinmanns and volunteers have been running the Monitor Museum as a road show since 1996, visiting schools to lecture on the 150-year-old ship.
They thought they had secured a home port in 2003, when oil company Motiva gave them one acre near Quay Street, where the ship was built.
A few months later, the city sent the museum a letter saying its land could be taken for the proposed Bushwick Inlet Park.
But the 28-acre park, from North Ninth Street to Quay Street, has been stalled for years. The city has acquired only two of six private parcels, and there’s no schedule or budget to secure the rest.
“We met with the Greenpoint Monitor Museum and their counsel early and offered to work with them to find a way to make the museum still happen,” city Law Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Thomas said.
Thomas said the museum never responded to requests for more information on their plans.
Janice Weinmann said city planners offered only unacceptable alternatives, including a suggestion that the museum could open in a “room” in a future comfort station.
“A room is not a museum,” she said. “The community, our schools, the country and the Greenpoint Monitor Museum deserve more.”
This year, the couple celebrated the USS Monitor’s 150th anniversary in an outdoor ceremony on their empty parcel.
They were joined by George’s chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which displays the sunken ship’s gun turret and engine at the Mariners’ Museum in Virginia.
The USS Monitor fought against the CSS Virginia in March 1862 —a famous draw that preserved the Union’s blockade in Norfolk, Va. She sank nine months later after getting caught in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C.
Weinmann said the feds are preparing to display some of the ironclad’s artifacts at the Greenpoint Monitor Museum once it opens, though they weren’t told which ones. The museum’s traveling show currently has two-foot models of the Civil War gunboats and replica war uniforms.
But until the city budges, the Monitor Museum is just treading water.
“Nine years have already been lost,” Weinmann said. “If the city’s only objective is to achieve public access . . . this can be accomplished without eminent domain.”