The Marine Workers Historical Collection was the result of a community history project on the Chelsea area of New York City conducted by Joe Doyle, then a New York University Department of Public History graduate student, beginning in 1981. Doyle set out to reconstruct and document the working-class population and institutions of the Chelsea waterfront of New York City in the first half of the twentieth century. Chelsea was a center of shipping and there was a sizable Irish presence in the area. Through walking tours, lectures, plays and locally published articles, Doyle examined the role of Irish politicians and maritime workers in the fabric of a neighborhood. Through oral history interviews, he learned that many founders of the National Maritime Union shipped out from the hiring halls of Chelsea. Doyle's grant application, project reports and an article in Public History(Vol. I, l984) explain the difficulties of trying to research the maritime history of a community that in some instances did not want that history written. During his second year of work on the project Doyle joined forces with the Marine Workers Historical Association, which was actively collecting documentary material.

In 1979, some sixty former seamen and longshoremen had formed the Marine Workers Historical Association to bring together those who had been engaged in the organizing efforts on waterfront and on shipboard in the 1930s, to preserve their history through documents and written and oral accounts by participants, and to make that history more widely known. The first issue of their newsletter, The Hawsepipe(Nov Dec, 1981), included a reference to the Tamiment Library's interest in adding documents, personal histories, photographs, etc. to its archives. Because many American seamen had shipped out of the Chelsea area, Joe Doyle had included MWHA seamen in his Chelsea research activities and he became a central contact person and chief solicitor of much of the current collection. The collection continues to seek out and accept donations of material.