Spouse wangled a hardhat construction tour of the new museums at the USS ARIZONA Memorial visitor's center. 7 Dec is the grand opening remembrance ceremony, of course, and it looks like everything will be ready on time.
When the original visitor's center opened over three decades ago, it immediately exceeded all crowd projections and has never kept up with demand. Today it's Hawaii's most-visited attraction. A few years ago when the National Park Service started to plan an upgrade, it was discovered that the whole center was sinking into its landfill. After $56M of donations (and hundreds of concrete pilings), the theater has been refurbished and the rest of the complex has been completely rebuilt. The Navy consolidated ownership of the property between Halawa Stream and the Ford Island Causeway, so the new visitor's center stretches along the shore from the boat landing all the way over to the USS BOWFIN Submarine Museum. There's better road access, more parking, and greatly-improved pedestrian flow. The motley collection of cramped buildings has been transformed into a waterfront park.
The building designs are impressive, the museums are fantastic, the infrastructure has joined the 21st century, and a number of improvements have sped up the access and raised capacity. There's much more to do now while waiting for the boat. Rediscovered documents and artifacts have been added from the National Archives and survivor's donations. A second film shows many more details of the attack, including actual closeup movie footage of the ARIZONA's magazine explosion.
The Navy is even running new boats on biodiesel.
We'll spend a few more hours down there when our daughter comes home on college break. It'll be interesting to see how it makes her reflect on her new Navy career. It certainly made spouse & me reflect on our old ones.
The picture on the left looks across the water from the museums to the Battleship MISSOURI Memorial, the ARIZONA Memorial, and the boat on its way out to the Memorial landing. (It also shows the Ford Island runway control tower that was strafed during the attack. The new Pacific Aviation Museum has obtained funding to refurbish it.) The photo on the right looks back on the two museum wings with the courtyard "Tree of Life" sculpture and other displays.
I've posted
more info & photos here, including interior shots of the museums and exhibits.
Frank will get my old laptop to "play with" as another backup computer, but probably next week instead of on Christmas, since we don't exchange Christmas presents. Instead we usually buy ourselves something that we really want.
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