Set aboard the USS Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier commissioned in 1943, the museum also displays a retired Concorde and the submarine USS Growler on the same pier.
Much of the museum is outdoors on the flight deck and involves stairs and ladders between decks, so dress for the weather and wear comfortable shoes.
Intrepid was commissioned on August 16, 1943 as an Essex-class carrier and spent the war being hit. A torpedo caught her during the Truk raid in February 1944 and jammed her steering, and the crew rigged a sail out of scrap canvas and hatch covers to hold a heading long enough to reach port. Two kamikazes struck in November 1944, killing sixty-nine men. She spent so much of the war in repair yards that her own crew called her the Dry I, and Decrepit.
Her second career is the more surprising one. She recovered Scott Carpenter after his Mercury flight in 1962 and picked up Gus Grissom and John Young after Gemini 3 in 1965, served off Vietnam, and was decommissioned for the last time on March 15, 1974. Zachary Fisher established the foundation that saved her from the scrapyard in March 1978, and the museum opened on August 3, 1982. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986, and a restoration between 2006 and 2008 took her to dry dock in Bayonne and then to Staten Island for interior work before she was towed back to Pier 86 in October 2008.
The pier holds three other artifacts that are each worth the trip on their own terms. The Concorde is G-BOAD, the British Airways aircraft that flew London to New York in 2 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds on February 7, 1996. The submarine Growler is a Grayback-class boat built to carry Regulus nuclear missiles, and her interior is genuinely tight. The Space Shuttle Enterprise went on display on July 19, 2012, was damaged when Hurricane Sandy struck that October, and its pavilion did not reopen until July 2013.
The ship itself is the exhibit. The hangar deck is cathedral-sized; the crew spaces below are not, and that contrast is the point.
Pier 86, W 46th St, New York, NY 10036 · Official site ↗
The Intrepid Museum is a military, aerospace, and history museum in New York City, United States. It is located at Pier 86 at 46th Street, along the Hudson River, in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan. The museum is composed of exhibits, aircraft, and the Space Shuttle Pavilion aboard the museum ship USS Intrepid, a World War II–era aircraft carrier and National Historic Landmark. Its collections include a cruise missile submarine named USS Growler and a Concorde on Pier 86. The Intrepid Museum Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization established in 1979, operates the museum.
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