April is "History Month" at Chelsea Piers. Throughout the month (and into May), Chelsea Piers is offering free waterfront history classes to public, private and parochial school students from around the city. So far, over 1,300 students are booked to attend these free one-hour classes about the history of waterfront activities at the site of Chelsea Piers. The class, entitled "These 30 Acres," is interactive and follows a time line from 1620 until the present. Classes are offered to students beginning with Grade 3. This is the third year for this very successful program.

First opened in 1910, the Chelsea Piers you see today are the last survivors of a once-grand row of nine ocean liner piers which were a frequent port of call for all the great ships that sailed during the heyday of transatlantic voyages. Among the frequent visitors were the Lusitania, Mauretania, Barengaria and Olympic. The Chelsea Piers were to be the final stop on the maiden voyage of Titanic, a crossing that, as everyone now knows, ended in disaster on April 14, 1912. Also, thousands of immigrants traveling in "steerage" made the Chelsea Piers their first stop before being ferried to Ellis Island for processing.

The history being taught goes back even farther than that. The discussion includes colonization by both the Dutch and the English, the birth of the Chelsea neighborhood in 1750 at a farm owned by Captain Thomas Clarke, and the Chelsea-Gansevoort Plan of 1880, which called for the construction of the Chelsea Piers nearly thirty years before they were actually built.

Classes are scheduled at the convenience of the schools. On Friday, April 16 and Saturday, April 17, 1998 at Noon, the general public is invited to attend open sessions of these history classes. If demand warrants, additional times will be scheduled. You must call to make a reservation for this free class.

For more information about History Month or to make reservations, please call 212.336.6881.