Miss. group wants cruiser for new museum

[Woodmonkey]

A group in Pascagoula, Miss., has asked Naval Sea Systems Command to push back the deadline by which it must apply to bring the decommissioned cruiser Ticonderoga to the Pascagoula waterfront as the centerpiece of a new maritime museum.

The Mississippi Ticonderoga Project plans to tell NavSea that local backers can’t get their application together by the original deadline of July 31, and ask that the Navy give them until October 2009 to make their pitch, said Jack Hoover, the project’s president.

But he stressed that the ball is rolling locally to get a site, money for renovations and a tug to tow the cruiser, also known by the nickname “Tico,” from Philadelphia, where it’s in mothballs at the Navy Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility.

“Tico was the first Aegis cruiser, built here in at Ingalls [Shipbuilding] in Pascagoula — there are a lot of people who want to see her come back here,” Hoover said. “The people who built her, the people who designed her, they’re all still here.”

Hoover and his compatriots envision that the Ticonderoga will be the centerpiece of a new maritime and shipbuilding museum. Although Baton Rouge, La., has the World War II-era destroyer Kidd and Mobile, Ala., has the retired battleship Alabama, Mississippi’s Gulf Coast doesn’t yet have its own retired warship museum.

The Ticonderoga’s comparative youth — the ship was commissioned in 1983 and decommissioned in 2004 — gives it a selling point over the other Gulf Coast ship museums, Hoover said. The ship is in better condition and has a Cold War story, he said, as opposed to World War II histories for the other two.

Waterfront communities across the U.S. have been inspired by the success of ship-centric museums in places such as Wilmington, N.C., home of a museum featuring the battleship North Carolina; or San Diego, home of the carrier Midway museum; and several cities are asking the Navy for ships of their own, hoping to be regional tourist hits.

The town of Vallejo, Calif., has been selected as the new home of the battleship Iowa, which had been sitting in mothballs in Suisun Bay, Calif.; a South Florida businessman wants to make a Cold War museum out of the retired carrier John F. Kennedy when the ship becomes available in a few years; and a group in Jacksonville, Fla. has applied to NavSea for the destroyer Charles F. Adams.

And in the Midwest, two cities — Bay City, Mich., and Sheboygan, Wis. — are competing to become the home of the Forrest Sherman-class destroyer Edson.

The Source