Intrepid Museum

Listen first. The Hudson River slaps against steel somewhere below you, and the wind off the water carries a faint smell of salt and diesel. Underfoot, the flight deck feels rough and gritty, nothing like a polished museum floor. That texture is deliberate. It gave sailors and aircraft a grip on a deck that pitched and rolled at sea. You are standing on a real warship, tied up at a pier on Manhattan's West Side, with the city's towers rising just beyond the railing.

This is the USS Intrepid, an Essex-class aircraft carrier. The Essex class was a large family of American carriers built during the Second World War. Intrepid was commissioned in 1943 and sent to the Pacific. Today she is the centrepiece of the Intrepid Museum, which covers the sea, the air, and space. But before any of that, she was a working ship with a crew of thousands, and a very hard war ahead of her.

The war found her quickly. In early 1944, during raids on the Japanese base at Truk, a torpedo struck Intrepid and damaged her rudder. Later in the war, she was hit by kamikaze aircraft — pilots who deliberately crashed their planes into ships. Sailors died aboard this ship. As you walk the decks, it helps to remember that. The museum is a place for curiosity and wonder, but it is also a memorial to the people who served here.

Here is the first surprise. Intrepid earned a strange nickname: the Ghost of the Gray Fleet. According to a popular story, Japanese propaganda broadcasts announced more than once that she had been sunk. Each time, she came back. Her crew had another name for her too — the Fighting I. Both names say something about how stubborn this ship was, and how often she returned to service after damage that might have finished her.

Intrepid did not retire after 1945. She was modernised, and in the 1950s she received an angled flight deck. This design let jets land at an angle while other aircraft waited forward. Look along the deck and you can see the landing area run off to one side. She later served during the Vietnam War. By the time she was decommissioned in 1974, she had carried propeller fighters, early jets, and helicopters across three decades of change.

Now the second surprise, and it reaches beyond the sea. Intrepid helped bring astronauts home. In 1962, she recovered Scott Carpenter after his Mercury mission splashed down in the Atlantic. In 1965, she recovered the crew of Gemini 3, Gus Grissom and John Young. Picture a capsule bobbing in the waves, helicopters lifting off from this deck, and a crowd of sailors cheering. A ship built for war became part of the space race.

After decommissioning, Intrepid could easily have been sold for scrap. Many ships of her generation were. A campaign led by the New York real estate developer Zachary Fisher saved her instead. The museum opened here in 1982. Since then, the pier has become a familiar sight from the West Side Highway. You will often see school groups, veterans, and families crossing the gangway together, each looking for something different.

Below you is the hangar deck, the cavernous space where aircraft were once stored and repaired. Today it holds exhibits, aircraft, and a lot of open air. The ceilings feel high, and sounds carry and echo off the steel. Take a moment to imagine it crowded with planes, wings folded, mechanics working under hard lights. Narrow ladders and passageways connect the decks. Sailors moved through them quickly, often in the dark, and you will feel how tight the spaces are.

Back up top, the flight deck works like an open-air gallery. Aircraft from different eras stand in rows. Among them is a Lockheed A-12, a sleek black reconnaissance jet from the same family as the famous SR-71 Blackbird. It was designed to fly extremely high and extremely fast, beyond the reach of enemy defences. Its dark skin and long, narrow body make it look more like a spacecraft than an aeroplane, even parked beside the river.

That brings us to an actual space vehicle. In a pavilion on the flight deck sits the Space Shuttle Enterprise, which arrived here in 2012. Enterprise never went into space. It was a test vehicle, used for approach and landing flights within the atmosphere. Those tests helped prove that a shuttle could glide home and land on a runway. Later that same year, Hurricane Sandy damaged the pavilion, and the museum had to repair it before visitors could return.

On the pier beside the ship, you can find two more remarkable machines. One is a British Airways Concorde, the supersonic airliner that once carried passengers across the Atlantic in a few hours. The other is the submarine Growler. This boat was built to carry Regulus nuclear cruise missiles during the Cold War. Inside Growler, the passageways are very narrow. Visitors who duck through it often come out with real respect for the crews who lived there.

The ship itself has had adventures even as a museum. In 2006, she was towed away for a major restoration, and the pier was rebuilt. The first attempt to move her failed — her propellers were stuck in the mud of the Hudson riverbed. Tugboats and dredging finally freed her. She returned to this pier in 2008. So the steel under your feet has travelled again, even after decades of rest.

Before you leave, walk to the edge of the flight deck and look out. On one side, the Hudson runs wide and grey toward the harbour. On the other, Midtown's buildings stack up behind the highway. Listen for the gulls, the traffic, and the wind in the rigging. This ship once crossed oceans and sailed under fire. Now she stays still and lets people come to her. As you step off the gangway, look back once at that long grey hull.