A 26-foot giant squid made from plastic picked up on Long Island beaches is hanging inside the Whaling Museum in Cold Spring Harbor, the centerpiece of a family exhibition on sea monsters and mermaids. The museum is also marking its 90th year, and November brings a pickle-making party, a cocktail-hour craft night and a book talk on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Monsters and Mermaids

The museum's new family exhibition looks at nautical myths and legends: how sailors used stories of sea creatures to explain what they saw on the water, and how those legends still shape art and culture. It runs through Labor Day 2027.

  • Medusa. Visitors can stand under the squid, a kraken-style sculpture by the Greenport artist Cindy Pease Roe, the founder of UpSculpt, who works with debris to raise environmental questions. She built it entirely from plastic collected along local shorelines, and the museum presents it as a way to think about how human impact is changing the ocean's stories. It was commissioned with an artist support grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and Suffolk County.
  • Mermaids through the ages. A section traces human interest in mermaids from cave paintings to fashion and to the logo on Starbucks coffee cups.
  • Draw a sea monster. Visitors can sketch sea creatures from historical descriptions.

Ninety years on Main Street

The Whaling Museum Society was founded in 1936 to preserve Cold Spring Harbor's history as one of Long Island's three whaling ports. Its collection holds about 6,000 artifacts, and its centerpiece is a historic whaleboat, the only fully equipped whaling vessel with its original gear on display in New York. The museum also holds one of the notable scrimshaw collections in the Northeast.

For the anniversary, anyone who joins as a new member between October 1 and December 31 gets 90 extra days of membership. Members get in free.

On the November calendar

  • Crafts and Cocktails: Corn Husk Figures, Thursday, November 12, 6:30 p.m. An adults' evening on the folklore of the corn husk doll, a craft rooted in the Indigenous farming traditions of North America, with an apple cocktail or mocktail. $35, or $25 for members.
  • Pickle Party, Sunday, November 15, at 1 and 3 p.m. For National Pickle Day, families learn what whalers ate at sea, including pickles, taste samples, explore the science of preserving food and make a jar of pickles to take home. $15 plus admission, or $10 for members.
  • Beyond the Book: Gales of November, Wednesday, November 18, 6:30 p.m. A discussion of John U. Bacon's book on the 1975 sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald on the Great Lakes and the dangers commercial mariners face on inland seas.
  • Secrets and Spies, during gallery hours. A self-guided hunt for hidden messages around the museum, built on the Culper Spy Ring, the Long Island spies of the Revolution. Players crack historical ciphers and earn a junior spy kit. $10 per participant plus admission, or $5 for members.

How to go

The museum gallery is at 301 Main Street in Cold Spring Harbor. Fall and winter hours are Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the museum is also open on Veterans Day, Wednesday, November 11, and December 28 to 30. Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for seniors 65 and older and children 4 to 17, and free for children 3 and under, active military with ID and members. There is no museum lot: unmetered street parking is usually available, and the free town lot next to the Cold Spring Harbor Post Office is about a five-minute walk. Registration links for each program are on the museum's events page.

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