Newport News, VA: the shipyard

I’ve been goiong down to Virginia for over 15 years, since we have family in Newport News and often meet up in the Virginia Beach/Sandbridge area for summer family reunions. I decided to utilize one of these family trips to take some arts adventures on the side and see what I could find. One place we often drive by which grabs my curiosity is the Newport News shipyard.

Share this page via:

The shipbuilding industry is still going strong here even today, and the current iteration of this company is the Huntington Ingalls Industries. Over the years that we’ve been driving down to visit family in Newport News, we almost always pass by these shipyards, which are an enormous presence in the downtown area, on the southwest corner of the city. I decided that this year, rather than just driving past the shipyards, I would stop in and poke around to see what I could see.

The first stop was the Victory Landing Park, at the end of 23rd Street in downtown Newport News. Docked to the left of the park were two huge ships, as seen in the photo below left. The one on the left is named the "SS Cornhusker State," and the one to the right of it is the "SS Gopher State."

How big are these ships? The SS Gopher State is 668 feet long ... and as a reference point, if the ship was upright, it would tower over the Washington Monument at 555 feet, and would dwarf the Statue of Liberty, at 305 feet.

How about weight? If nearly empty of cargo, the SS Gopher State itself weighs almost 14,000 tons, but if filled with cargo, it's capacity for total weight approaches 31,000 tons. Let’s make an art world comparison here: the sculptor Richard Serra, who is known for his massive steel sculptures, had an exhibition last fall at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC. This show featured two huge sculptures that nearly filled the 25,000 square foot space, and together these sculptures weighed 441 tons. You’d have to multiply that show 70 times to match the full weight of the SS Gopher State!

So what exactly are these ships used for? I took an interest specifically in the SS Gopher State ship, due to having grown up in the "Gopher State" of Minnesota. I learned that it is part of the Navy's "Ready Reserve Force," and is "on call" from the Newport News base for any cargo or supply transportation needs that the U.S. military might request. The ship sits empty while awaiting a mission, and must be ready to respond to a mission within a 5 day period. The ship has had some important missions in the past, including taking earthquake relief supplies to Haiti in 2010, as well as a secret mission in 2008 in which it transported 500 tons of low-grade uranium out of Iraq and over to Canada.

A few hundred yards away from the docked location of those two ships are several Huntington Ingalls Industries buildings, including this ship-shaped building (below left) used for research and technology related to their shipbuilding efforts. You can't see it from this picture, but the building has an open area at the base of the structure, which includes a small pool of water, further providing a "ship at sea" feel for the building. I thought it was pretty creative that the company would make a ship-shaped building for their shipbuilding business.

After getting the vantage point of the shipyard from this park, I got back in my car and drove further into the shipyards area – at least what is accessible to the public, since a fair amount of the area is closed off for national security purposes, due to the fact that they build submarines and other ships for the U.S. Navy. Below right is a slideshow of some of what I found to be visually interesting elements of the area.