If you like both museums and military exhibitions, then now’s the time to start planning for New York vacations.

Thursday, Oct 2nd 2008, the 65 year old ghostship which refuses to go down - the WWII Essex class aircraft carrier USS Intrepid - returned to its its old berth off Pier 86 in Manhattan’s West side, leading a comic flottila of police boats, sightseeing crafts and tugboats. Photo by JL2003 via flickr (creative commons).

The warship was already engineless when it departed from Manhattan in a cockamamie exit in 2006, when its propellers got stuck in the mud and the US Navy had to spend a month dredging to free the ship. I remember the debate back then over whether the cost of extricating the Intrepid was worth the trouble.

For the record, the USS Intrepid took in seven bomb strikes, five kamikaze suidice runs and one torpedo hit during the Pacific campaign of WWII, and still kept going back into action after repairs, and earned something of a reputation as an unsinkable ‘Ghost Ship.’ That’s the kind of history you can’t leave stuck in the muddy waters off New York, even if it cost $100 million and 2 years to bring it back into action.

Anyway, the warship has now returned after 2 years without the offending propellers, hauled in by the tugboats. The flottila left Homeport Pier in Staten Island at 11.00 am, passed the Statue of Liberty at 12.15 pm, Ground Zero at 1.00 pm where former crew members of the Intrepid unfirled the American flag in a special tribute, and arrived at Pier 86 at 2 pm, to a hero’s welcome with crowds gathered along the West Side waterfront and Pier 84. A digital Countdown clock flashed ‘Today’ atop the pier. 

The Intrepid forms the centerpiece of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, which will reopen Nov 8 2008. Both the pier and the ship have been patched up, and the exhibits on the ship have been joined by new ones including a 5000 lb. Sikorsky HO4S-3G helicopter, a restored MIG 21, an  FJ-3 Fury and a UH-1A Huey.

Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Thomas
Filed under: Art & Museums, NYC