An aircraft carrier moored on the Hudson with a Concorde, a Space Shuttle and a submarine parked around it. The best museum in New York for anyone who likes machines.
The ship
USS Intrepid is an Essex-class carrier commissioned in 1943. She was hit by kamikaze aircraft four times and by a torpedo once, was rebuilt twice, flew combat missions off Vietnam, and served as the recovery ship for two Mercury and Gemini splashdowns. She was decommissioned in 1974, saved from scrapping, and opened as a museum at Pier 86 in 1982.
You walk the hangar deck, which holds exhibitions and several aircraft; the flight deck, open to the sky with about two dozen aircraft parked on it including an SR-71’s smaller cousin, an F-16 and a Soviet MiG; and, on a separate ticketed tour, parts of the ship below — the mess, the berths, the anchor chain room, the bridge and the combat information centre.
The flight deck in a January wind is a serious proposition. Dress for the river.
The Space Shuttle
Enterprise is in a pavilion on the flight deck. She never flew in space — she was the atmospheric test article, dropped from the back of a 747 in 1977 to prove a shuttle could glide and land — and she is the reason the whole shuttle programme worked. She was flown to New York on the back of a 747 in 2012, which a great many New Yorkers watched from their office windows.
The pavilion also holds a Soyuz descent module and a good exhibition on the space programme.
The other two
Concorde sits on the pier alongside. This one, Alpha Delta, holds the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a commercial aircraft: New York to London in two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds. You can go inside on some ticket types, and the cabin is far smaller than anyone expects — a narrow tube with two seats either side of an aisle you have to duck along.
USS Growler is a diesel-electric cruise missile submarine from 1958, and you go through it. It is genuinely claustrophobic and there is no way out except the way you came, along a corridor about shoulder-width. It is the highlight for a lot of visitors and it is not for everybody.
Practical
Mon–Fri 10:00–17:00, weekends and holidays until 18:00, last entry an hour before. Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
General admission covers the ship, the flight deck, Enterprise and Growler. Concorde interior access and the guided below-deck tours are extra.
Allow three hours. Four if the submarine queue is long, which it usually is by midday.
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American Museum of Natural History
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