Charlestown Navy Yard puts on its dress whites
Visitors to the Charlestown Navy Yard are about to see its history come to life - just in time for the Fourth. For next year's celebration, there's the promise of even more.
But first, this year. On Thursday morning, the National Park Service will open a new visitor center in the former officers' club building, just astern of the USS Constitution's berth.
The center will focus on the mission of the Navy Yard - "the ships that were built here, and the men who kept them seaworthy," as Terry Savage, Boston National Historic Park, superintendent, put it.
The yard opened in 1800, and by the time it was closed in 1974, some 200 warships had been built there - from the Independence, the Navy's first ship of the line, to the destroyers and destroyer escorts of World War II.
There has been a visitors center, said Savage, "but you'd have to know your way around the yard to find it." The new center will be more conspicuous and offer a thorough introduction to the yard. In addition to photograph-murals and artifacts, a 10-minute film produced by Boston-based Northern Lights Productions and narrated by retired Navy Yard workers will depict the workings of the yard's two most impressive innovations.
The 1837 steam-powered ropewalk wove 1,200-foot lengths of anchor cable, and the superheated forge, developed by yard workers in 1928, fused links of chain strong enough to anchor a battleship or aircraft carrier.
Savage said he expects visitors will spend up to a half-hour, including viewing the film, at the visitor center. They will be able to exit directly through a screening station to explore a ship that wasn't built at the Charlestown yard, but is now the focal point of any visit there.
The Constitution was built in Boston in 1797, three years before the yard opened. Visitors can take a 30-minute tour led by Navy personnel, then head to the adjacent USS Cassin Young, a destroyer built on the West Coast in 1943, or across the shipyard to the USS Constitution Museum.
The privately operated museum is halfway through a two-year redesign of its exhibits intended to more fully engage visitors in the history of the Constitution, said executive vice president Anne Grimes Rand.
"We tell a complementary story" to that of the visitor center, said Rand.
On the first floor, there's a 19-minute film and a succession of exhibits dealing with the Constitution's history. Upstairs are the more innovative features - now in early versions, with finished models by next year.
The upgrading of the exhibits, Rand said, will be based on extensive "exit interviews" of some of the museum's 340,000 visitors per year. As an example, Rand pointed out an exhibit currently popular with young visitors - a yardarm that would have crossed the ship's mast, complete with the rigging lines that sailors stood on as they furled or unfurled the sails, and a heavy canvas sail itself.
Even now, the yardarm creaks ominously when a young visitor clambers on it. But to make it a more realistic experience, Rand said, there will be images of swirling storm clouds projected on the wall behind the yardarm to give the feeling of furling those sails in the middle of a storm.
In another part of the museum, visitors currently enter the interactive exhibit area through a small room fitted out as a recruiting station where would-be crewmen are quizzed to gauge their seaworthiness.
In the updating, there may be a replica of a small boat to ferry successful candidates out to the anchorage.
Right now there is a "battle theater" with an eight-minute film, complete with shouted orders and the crash of gunfire.
"We'd like to have a participatory cannonade," said Rand. "But that has some issues we haven't solved."
Thursday's ribbon-cutting ceremony will begin at 11 a.m. and include a performance by a vocal trio that will recreate a World War II-era USO cabaret show. The National Park Service visitor center, the USS Cassin Young, and Constitution Museum are open daily; the USS Constitution every day but Monday. Admission is free.
