Museum Usage
Typically the visitor enters via gangplank, wanders around on the deck, then goes below, usually using the original stairways, giving a sense of how the crew got around. The interior features restored but inactivated equipment, enhanced with mementos including old photographs, explanatory displays, pages from the ship's logs, menus, and the like. Some add recorded sound effects, audio tours or video displays to enhance the experience.
In some cases ships the radio room has been brought back into use, with volunteers operating amateur radio equipment. Often the callsign assigned is a variation on the original identification of the ship. For example, the submarine USS Cobia, which had the call NBQV, is now on the air as NB9QV. The WWII submarine USS Pampanito SS383, berthed at the National Maritime Historic Park in San Francisco, had the wartime call NJVT and is now on the air as NJ6VT. In other cases, such as the USS Missouri, a distinctive call (in this case KH6BB) is used. This radio work not only helps restore part of the vessel, but provides worldwide publicity for the museum ship.
A number of the larger museum ships have begun to offer hosting for weddings, meetings, and other events, sleepovers, and on a few ships still seaworthy, cruises. In the United States, this includes the USS Constitution's annual "turnaround", where the old ship is towed out into the harbor and brought back in facing the other way, so as to weather evenly. A place on the deck is by invitation or lottery only, and highly prized.
Many consider the tourism appeal of an interesting old vessel on the city waterfront strong enough that any port city should showcase one or more museum ships. This may even include building a replica ship at great expense.
Read more about this topic: Museum Ship
Famous quotes containing the words museum and/or usage:
“Always clung to by barnacles.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2661, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)