New building will give maritime artifacts room to shine
January 20, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Posted by Robert C. Burns | Source: The Muskegon Chronicle
The World War II Navy submarine USS Silversides has become a familiar sight along the Muskegon Channel since its arrival from Chicago’s Navy Pier two decades ago.
But there’s a great deal more to the Great Lakes Naval Memorial and Museum — an outfit whose Navy and World War II-era artifacts number in the thousands, many of which have been stashed away in storage areas for lack of space to display them.
That is a situation the museum’s board of directors is well on its way to correcting. A new $2 million channel-side museum is scheduled for opening in mid-June, rounding out a visitor destination center that is expected to attract more than 50,000 visitors annually.
It includes the highly popular Silversides, now a National Historic Landmark, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter McLane. Built in 1927 as a Prohibition-era “rum chaser,” it later saw service in World War II and came to Muskegon in 1993.
