An Intrepid return
The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Intrepid moved from Staten Island back to its permanent home on the west side of Manhattan.
New York (Oct. 2) — “I know one thing for sure: the mud is not going to get us today.”
With that fate-tempting pronouncement, Bill White, the president of the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum, called on a team of tugboat operators to begin the scheduled voyage of the aircraft carrier that houses the museum. Several minutes after 11 a.m. on Thursday, the 65-year-old ship began sliding away from a pier on Staten Island for the five-mile trip back to its berth on the West Side of Manhattan. (The ship finally arrived at Pier 86 shortly after 2 p.m.)
About 400 people, including 250 former Intrepid crew members and a New York Police Department band, were aboard the ship for the return journey, which was expected to take about three hours. The departure had none of the problems of the first try at hauling the Intrepid away from Manhattan in November 2006. That effort, the first effort to move the 900-foot ship in almost 25 years, ended soon after it began when the ship’s idle propellers stuck in the muddy bottom of the Hudson River.
After a second round of dredging under the ship, a team of tugboats pulled the Intrepid loose and towed it to a drydock in Bayonne, N.J., for repairs and a new coat of gun-metal gray paint.
After almost two years away, the ship is returning to Pier 86 in the Hudson River Park, which was rebuilt to accommodate the floating museum, the submarine and the retired Concorde supersonic jet. The museum is scheduled to reopen to the public on Nov. 11, Veterans Day.