Marine Log - October 2008 - (Page 52)

SHIPBUILDINGHISTORY October 2008 Vol. 113 No. 10 B Y T I M C O LT O N Quincy Shipyard’s astonishing journey uincy shipyard was started by Alexander Graham Bell's famous assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in 1886, as the Fore River Engine Company, in East Braintree, Mass. Soon, it moved to Quincy and became the Fore River Ship & Engine Company. Although its first three hulls were yachts, the yard’s next deliveries were two destroyers. By 1901, it was building battleships, demonstrating early on that this was going to be a yard to be reckoned with. In fact, it was to become one of the world's great shipbuilders. By the time Watson sold it to Bethlehem Steel in 1913, the yard had already built 217 vessels, including six battleships and the Thomas W. Lawson, believed to be the only seven-masted Q www.shipbuildinghistory.com sailing ship ever built. The yard was expanded for the World War I effort and turned out 57 submarines and 71 destroyers, 35 of them at a special-purpose facility at nearby Squantum. Employment reached 15,000. The years between the wars were bleak for most yards, but Quincy was able to keep reasonably busy, building such ships as the battleship Massachusetts, the aircraft carriers Lexington and Wasp, and Matson’s large passenger vessels, Mariposa, Monterey and Lurline. By the late 1930’s, both the Navy and the U.S. Maritime Commission were building up shipbuilding capacity and the Quincy yard was one of only a handful of large yards that was still going strong. The yard was expanded further with $21 million from the Navy. Employment was already at 17,000 by Pearl Harbor and peaked at 32,000. The WWII effort produced 125 ships, including a battleship and five aircraft carriers. Meanwhile, another mass-production facility was established, in Hingham, with another $35 million from the Navy; this yard reached 23,000 employees and turned out 92 destroyer-escorts and 95 LSTs in two-and-a-half years. After the war, the Quincy yard continued as both a merchant and a naval shipbuilder, building the liners Independence and Constitution, and the nuclear cruisers, Long Beach and Bainbridge. The yard was not as successful as Bethlehem’s other big yards, however, and, in 1963, they sold it to General Dynamics. GD concentrated at first on naval shipbuilding, but then invested heavily in becoming a builder of large tankers and LNG carriers. The yard was still not financially successful, however, and it closed in 1986. From here on, the story of the Quincy yard is a series of humiliating embarrassments. GD sold the 130acre property to the Com- monwealth of Massachusetts’ Water Resources Authority, which, for ages, did nothing with it. Then, in 1997, up popped a Greek named Sotirios Emmanouil, with a start-up company called Massachusetts Heavy Industries, who bought it for only $10 million. He applied to MARAD for $55 million in Title XI financing to modernize it. MARAD, to its credit, rejected the application, but the Massachusetts Congressional delegation forced it through. MHI defaulted in 1999 before it could complete the modernization. Title then passed to MARAD, which sold it at auction in Jan. 2003, for only $12 million. The yard has now been liquidated, the final insult being the recent sale of the yard’s 1,200-ton gantry crane to a shipyard in Romania. As we reported on August 14, 2008, the crane’s disassembly resulted in a fatal accident. For more information go to: www.marinelog.com/DOCS/NE WSMMVII/2008aug00142 ML MARINELOG ISSN 08970491 A Simmons-Boardman Publication 345 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10014 Tel: (212) 620-7200 Fax: (212) 633-1165 Website: http://www.marinelog.com Advertising Sales UNITED STATES New York Sales Office 345 Hudson St., 12th floor New York, NY 10014 Roland Espinosa Sales Director Tel (212) 620-7225 Fax (212) 633-1165 E-mail: respinosa@sbpub.com U.S. GULF COAST Jeff Sutley Tel (212) 620-7233 Fax (212) 633-1165 E-mail: jsutley@sbpub.com WORLDWIDE Donna Edwards, International Sales Manager e-mail: dedwards@sbpub.com Marine Log (UK) Suite K5 & K6, The Priory Syresham Gardens Haywards Heath RH16 3LB UNITED KINGDOM Tel: +44 1444 416368 Fax: +44 1444 458185 Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore Representattive Benn Wood Tel:+44 1444 416908 Fax: +44 1444 458185 E-mail: bw@railjournal.co.uk Korea Young-Seoh Chinn JES Media International 2nd Fl. ANA Bldg. 257-1, Myungil Dong, Kangdong-Gu Seoul 134-070, Korea Tel: +822-481-3411 Fax: +822-481-3414 e-mail: jesmedia@unitel.co.kr CLASSIFIED SALES Diane Okon Classified Advertising Sales 20 South Clark St., Suite 2450 Chicago, IL 60603 Tel: (312) 683-5022 Fax: (312) 683-0131 E-mail: dokon@sbpub-chicago.com USPS 576-910 52 MARINE LOG OCTOBER 2008 www.marinelog.com Marine Log archives http://www.shipbuildinghistory.com http://www.marinelog.com/DOCS/NE WSMMVII/2008aug00142 http://www.marinelog.com http://www.marinelog.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Marine Log - October 2008

Marine Log - October 2008 Contents Editorial Second Thoughts Update Inside Washington Fresh Fuel Ferries Exhibitors Preview Ferries get "Smarter" China's Great Ambitions Newsmakers Tech News Contracts Events Website Directory ML Buyer's Guide ML Marketplace Shipbuilding History

Marine Log - October 2008

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