Lars Hansen atop the Peking at the South Street Seaport in 1991.

I just read that Lars Hansen died the day before yesterday in a nursing home in Florida.  He was 86.  For three decades he had been the master rigger of the  historic vessels of the South Street Seaport until he suffered a stroke a few years ago and had to retire.

When profiled in the New York Times two years ago, the author wrote that ”Mr. Hansen reigned for 30 years as king of the still-gritty side of the seaport. … In the collective imagination of the seaport’s salts, Mr. Hansen is a Paul Bunyan of the sea. They speak of his strength in terms like “gentle giant,” and of his kindness in phrases typically reserved for the canonization process.”

Captain of the Low Seas

Like any seaman worthy of the name, Mr. Hansen is capable of some salty language. But he surely qualifies as a romantic figure. A strikingly handsome Dane with twinkling hazel eyes and a silver mustache, he spent his teenage years resisting the Nazis, took to the sea for the heyday of the merchant marine, and settled in New York to become both an embodiment of the nautical virtues and an éminence grise of the city’s jazz scene.

Every hero deserves a dramatic stage, and for the past three decades, Mr. Hansen has made his home in the master cabin of the Peking, the enormous turn-of the-century square-rigger that has become a familiar part of the Lower Manhattan skyline. He was invited aboard by the South Street Seaport Museum when it hired him to restore the then-derelict ship and the Wavertree, its nearly as shoddy sister, as part of the museum’s efforts to revive the seaport.

Sadly, we will now have to use the past tense in speaking of Lars Hansen.