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Joe Hill, a purveyor of maritime junk and jewels and a swashbuckling South Road Seaport fixture for many years, died on Oct. 17 in Huntington, N.Y., on Lengthy Island. He was 76.
His household mentioned his dying, at a hospice facility, resulted from problems of dementia.
Till he needed to abandon the shop in 2000 due to lease will increase, Mr. Hill was one of many final hyperlinks to the South Road neighborhood’s seafaring previous, holding out towards a tide of high-end shops that have been remodeling a salty nook of Manhattan into an more and more homogenized business panorama and vacationer mecca.
It was all an act, after all — his pirate’s hat was as pretend because the parrot on his shoulder, the patch over his eye and the “aarhs” and “mateys” with which he greeted prospects at his nautical junkyard of a retailer, Captain Hook’s.
However his eccentricity was real, as was his devotion to the seafaring bric-a-brac he collected — pilot wheels, weirdly formed coral, diving helmets, a dried barracuda, shell coasters, driftwood — all of which gave him a connection to a spot that was wealthy in historical past and whose bland, commercialized current he steadfastly rejected.
“Fairly an exquisite character,” Peter Neill, a former director of the South Road Seaport Museum, mentioned in an interview. “Considered one of plenty of outdated seaport characters, now all gone.”
“The Seaport is shedding its character — me,” Mr. Hill modestly instructed The New York Instances in 1998, when, lastly, a tenfold enhance in lease started to drive him out. “It’s a disgrace,” he mentioned. “Individuals come right here for a seaport and what do they get? A shopping center, similar to they’ve at residence.”
More and more misplaced in an setting taken over by Ann Taylor and Coach, he was one of many final of the outdated tenants to go, on the heels of classic eating places like Sweets, established in 1842 and simply down the road.
Earlier than then he had reigned supreme at his cluttered retailer in the midst of Schermerhorn Row, the early-Nineteenth-century block of brick homes on Fulton Road now designated a landmark. Mr. Hill’s was the “consummate waterfront junk shop-souvenir retailer, sometimes aspiring to an vintage store,” Mr. Neill mentioned. Generally the strains of individuals ready to get in stretched to the nook.
Mr. Hill opened Captain Hook’s with the Revolution’s Bicentennial in 1976 and remained till the flip of the century, organising store “when there was nothing there,” his spouse, Trudy Hill, recalled. He had hitched himself to the city renewal desires that had percolated by Decrease Manhattan within the late Sixties and ’70s, satisfied he would make a fortune from his curate’s egg of a retailer in a location that was changing into a serious vacationer attraction.
A pure salesman, pushing $2 postcards on prospects together with the fancier stuff, he was additionally persistent about accumulating ideas. He labored like a demon, and he did properly sufficient to afford a home for a time on Lengthy Island’s North Shore in prosperous Sands Level, although he was a “misfit” there, his son Matthew mentioned, surrounded by rich company founders.
His different son, Jason, mentioned: “How loopy was it that someone who flipped gadgets was in a position to make it to Sands Level? An individual who went to storage gross sales?”
At one level Mr. Hill charged 25 cents merely for the privilege of viewing his huge assortment of nautical trinkets. A few of them, just like the sextants and the $500 spy glasses and the $2,000 ship fashions, have been fairly invaluable. However most prospects would go away solely slightly poorer, having been talked into, say, a rubber snake by the persistent Mr. Hill, half huckster and half honest fanatic — a “good merchandizer,” Mr. Neill mentioned.
Mr. Hill had spent weekends within the Eighties combing farmhouse barns in New England and haunting flea markets to fill the shop. “He would go to locations no person else went,” his spouse mentioned.
He embraced the Captain Hook character immortalized in J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” and quite a few movie variations. He would pose with a knife in his tooth and a whale tooth round his neck, to the delight of schoolchildren and the bemusement of consumers from world wide. In his retailer’s early days, he would even introduce his father, a World Battle II veteran, as Poppa Hook and his mom as Momma Hook.
“He stayed Captain Hook eternally,” Ms. Hill mentioned. “Good mates would name and say, ‘The place’s Hook?’’’
To enter the shop, as a baby, was like happening “a treasure hunt,” Matthew Hill mentioned. There was no backside to the layers of junk. His father’s shtick was merely a part of it. “Embarrassing? It was like, ‘Oh, my God, Dad, don’t do this.’”
However, Matthew mentioned, “he doesn’t care what folks suppose — he cared about making folks pleased.” And prospects went together with it. “Welcome aboard!” Mr. Hill would yell out.
“Everyone needs to be a pirate and a child and have one thing to remind them of all that,” Mr. Hill instructed a Newsday reporter in 1983.
When the shop closed, “he was unhappy for a very long time,” Ms. Hill mentioned.
“They made it right into a shopping center, and he was very upset with that,” she added. “His retailer was totally different. It was greater than an revenue.”
There have been gives to reopen the shop elsewhere, however Mr. Hill was a New York pirate and didn’t need to transfer. Earlier than he closed the place, there had been years of rigidity and a five-year court docket battle over the lease rise together with his landlord, the Rouse Company, which ran the business aspect of the seaport.
“They didn’t like him as a result of he wasn’t fancy,” Ms. Hill mentioned. “They at all times wished to kick him out. They wished solely the upper-class shops.”
Joseph Stanley Hill was born on Nov. 9, 1946, and grew up in Center Village, Queens, the place he attended public faculties, together with Aviation Excessive College. His father, Jack, was a dry-goods salesman, and his mom, Pearl, labored at a toy firm in Queens.
Along with his spouse and sons, Mr. Hill is survived by a daughter, Michelle.
His father and his maternal grandfather have been weekend fishermen, going for the cod off Montauk Level, on Lengthy Island’s East Finish, and in later years Mr. Hill at all times had a ship. He graduated from the New York Institute of Expertise in 1968, served within the Inexperienced Beret reserves and have become an engineer, ultimately engaged on tasks for 2 giant East Coast building firms.
His coronary heart was elsewhere, although. His first buy of a nautical merchandise was an outdated ship’s wheel, and he by no means regarded again. He had saved sufficient from working in building to open a small nautical items retailer in Port Washington, on Lengthy Island. This was quickly adopted by the shop in Schermerhorn Row, which needed to be renovated from prime to backside, his spouse recalled.
“See, what I did,” he instructed a reporter in 1983, “was flip a passion right into a enterprise.”
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