After a $10 million makeover, Battleship NJ is expected to return to Camden this summer

The Battleship New Jersey’s $10 million facelift in South Philadelphia should be completed in time for the beloved ship to return home to the Camden Waterfront by early summer.

“The goal is to be fully open to the public prior to the July 4 weekend, if not sooner,” said Marshall Spevak, CEO of the Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial. About 60% of the work to “refresh” the ship is complete, he said.

Since arriving in South Philly propelled by tugboats on March 27, “Big J”— 887 feet long, four stories tall, and weighing 45,000 tons — has been resting on 302 concrete keel blocks in the same dry dock from which it was launched on Dec. 7, 1942.

» READ MORE: Battleship New Jersey moved from Camden to Paulsboro. It was a spectator sport.

Workers from Philadelphia Ship Repair are repainting and repairing the hull as well as replacing anticorrosion technology. A separate crew of carpenters is installing a new teak deck, a $4 million project that, like the hull work, is being paid for with a mix of public and private funding.

The hull project also includes inspecting and, where needed, sealing about 160 through holes that drew in seawater to cool the engines when the ship was operational.

Although Boston-based North Atlantic Ship Repair plans to close its Philadelphia operation as of June 30, the parent firm’s chief operations officer, Donna Connors, said the closure would not affect the battleship work.

“The vessel will be fully serviced prior to departure back to its home berth,” she said. “We look forward to a successful completion of this long-awaited project.”

Before the ship was dry-docked, visual inspections by divers indicated that the hull — which hadn’t been out of the water in more than 30 years — was not seriously deteriorating.

“It turned out the hull was in tremendous shape, as good as you could possibly ask for,” Spevak said.

He and others among Big J’s stewards also were surprised by the outpouring of public interest in dry dock tours of the ship, as well as on the Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel, its Facebook page, and elsewhere on social media. National media, including the New York Times and NBC News, also have covered the project.

“There’s a lot of good karma going on,” said Spevak.

“I’m absolutely blown out of the water by the public response. I never expected anything close to this,” Big J’s curator, Ryan Szimanski, said.

So far, more than 5,000 people have taken guided tours — tickets cost $225 per person for a standard tour, or $1,000 per person for a tour led by Szimanski. Tours are limited to 10 people at a time.

Proceeds have more than made up for the projected revenue loss of between $700,000 and $800,000 while the ship has been absent from the Camden Waterfront.

The weekend guided tours will conclude the weekend of June 7-9.

More than 240,000 viewers now subscribe to Big J’s YouTube channel, where Szimanski is both congenial host and enthusiastic instructor about the history and workings of the ship — the more arcane, the better.

“What I do on the channel is geek out,” he said. “And viewers get a chance to geek out with me.”

Sales of merchandise, including special goods related to the dry docking, are brisk. Replicas of a nuclear weapons key left on the ship after it was decommissioned for the last time in the 1990s are popular, as are little glass vials of rust scraped from the hull, and wood shavings from the teak deck replacement process.

“The ship was a home to over 45,000 sailors and Marines during its 21 years in the active fleet, and that type of service evokes nostalgia, patriotism, and gratitude,” Spevak said. “They don’t make ships like this any more.”

After a contentious North-South political battle in New Jersey, the U.S. Navy in 2000 chose Camden over Bayonne, Hudson County, for the battleship’s permanent home as a floating museum.

The decision followed a grassroots campaign energized by tens of thousands of residents on both sides of the Delaware. South Philly and South Jersey both have familial or other ties to those who helped build or served aboard the warship that was launched on the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.

“And now, the dry docking is a once-in-a-generation event,” said former N.J. Assembly member Patricia Egan Jones, a leader of the campaign to secure the ship for Camden.

“People share our desire to make sure the most highly decorated ship in the history of the Navy will be here for the next 30 years,” she said. “The dry dock tours have caught the imagination of people.”

Leo Wieger, 68, of Hamilton Square, Mercer County, is a 28-year U.S. Navy veteran and curator of the Chief Petty Officers Exhibit on the battleship.

His late father, Leo Sr., was a commissioning crew member, known as a “plank owner,” of Big J.

Wieger said he was struck by “the massiveness” as he looked down on the ship at the beginning of a recent tour. The bottom of the 103-year-old dry dock is below sea level.

“Once you climb down the stairs, you can see the immensity and the power,” he said. “You put your hands on the hull of the largest and fastest and most-decorated battleship. It’s a feeling of ownership. It’s once-in-a-lifetime.”

Michael Melniczuk, 43, of Pilesgrove, Salem County, owns Farmers & Bankers Brewing in neighboring Woodstown and is sponsoring a beer event at the battleship after it returns to Camden.

“I’m also an engineer, and when I did the tour, the size of the ship was overwhelming,” he said, adding that his late grandmother worked for many years at the New York Shipbuilding Co. in Camden. The company shut down in 1967.

“Helping preserve history is very important for me,” Melniczuk said.

The 22 years Battleship NJ has been berthed in Camden have not been a smooth sail. The annual number of visitors has fluctuated, budgets have been cut, and the pandemic still casts a shadow, the ship’s stewards said.

Nonetheless, “the overwhelming response to the dry dock tours tells me that people care about what we’re doing,” said Szimanski.

Completion of the work and coming back to Camden are a signal of confidence in the future of the Big J and the city, Spevak said.

“The battleship is part of the fabric of the community,” said Camden Mayor Victor Carstarphen, adding that the departure of the vessel has left an “unmistakable” void.

“It’s comforting knowing this piece of American history has been preserved for future generations,” he said. “We all look forward to [the battleship’s] grand return home to the Camden Waterfront.”