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Olympia needs $30m in repairs, new caretaker

The world’s oldest floating steel warship and the sole surviving naval ship of the Spanish-American War is fighting for survival.

The cruiser Olympia, made famous during the Battle of Manila Bay, needs $30 million for repairs and endowment funds to keep it open to the public. The Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia does not have the money and has put out a call to find an organization or donor to pony up.

“We have advised the U.S. Navy that Independence Seaport Museum will relinquish its stewardship of this national naval treasure and its valuable artifact collections,” said Board Chairman Peter McCausland. “Because every staff and board member deeply care about and respect this historic ship, we stand ready to assist the Navy in an aggressive search to find a new home for Olympia and its related collections.”

The ship, a National Historic Landmark, put the U.S. on the map as a superpower with its decisive win against the Spanish in the Philippines in the opening battle of the Spanish-American War. The success won fame for Commodore George Dewey, who famously said from the ship’s bridge, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.”

The museum has not been able to raise the $10 million needed to dredge the Penn’s Landing Marina to transport the Olympia to dry dock and restore the hull and deck and the $10 million needed for a complete below-deck restoration. An additional $10 million would be needed as an endowment to maintain the ship.

Museum officials originally agreed to take on the vessel in 1995 and expected that when Penn’s Landing was redeveloped into a retail-tourist attraction that it would bring a flood of visitors, who would help support the ship and museum, said James McLane, the museum’s interim president. That redevelopment never happened, and the museum’s nearly 80,000 visitors a year are not enough to sustain it and the ship, he said.

The focus must be on the museum, McLane said.

“We’ve got to keep the museum going, or you could sink both,” he said.

The Olympia was built in 1892 and decommissioned in 1922. Ideally, steel hull ships such as Olympia are supposed to be dry-docked every 20 years, but Olympia has been in the water continuously for the past 65 years. The ship’s hull needs daily monitoring to make sure that small holes that emerge are patched quickly. The museum has spent more than $5.3 million on maintenance and restoration work since it took possession of it.

For the past two years, the museum has tried to get funding from various entities, including the City of Philadelphia, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Navy, the federal government, and private funders. All are having a difficult time emerging from the Great Recession and can not afford to take on the project, McLane said.

The Navy sent a team to Philadelphia to determine how much it would cost to do the dredging and repair work. The Navy still has a contract with the museum to take care of the ship, and officials would not comment on the historic ship’s future if there are no takers.

“It really is premature for us to speculate on what steps we will take if they are unable to transfer it,” said Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command.