Stephen Decatur

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

From 1971 to 2003, Veterans Stadium loomed over South Philadelphia as the shared home of the Phillies and Eagles, a hulking multipurpose bowl that seated more than 65,000 fans. "The Vet" witnessed three World Series, two baseball All-Star Games, championship football, and seventeen storied Army-Navy games before it was demolished in 2004. For a generation of Philadelphians, it was the raucous heart of the city's sporting life.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA hatched one of its boldest intelligence gambits: recovering a Soviet submarine from three miles down in the Pacific. The cover story was billionaire Howard Hughes mining the seabed for manganese, but the true purpose was espionage, and the Glomar Explorer—built at the Sun Shipbuilding yard in Chester—was the improbable machine to do it. In 1974 its giant claw lifted portions of the wreck, and the recovered Soviet sailors were given a burial at sea.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

In 1748 anxious Philadelphians, organized into a volunteer defense force called the Association, threw up the colony's largest fortification along the Delaware River, bristling first with 27 and soon some 50 guns. The battery guarded the river approaches to a Quaker city that had long resisted maintaining a standing military. Decades later the same strategic riverbank hosted the first Philadelphia Navy Yard from 1800 to 1875.

Camden, NJ

This massive bronze screw once helped drive the USS New Jersey (BB-62), an Iowa-class battleship and one of the most decorated warships in U.S. Navy history. Commissioned during World War II, she went on to serve in the Korean and Vietnam Wars and again in the 1980s before becoming a museum ship at Camden, across the river from where much of her steel took shape. The propeller is displayed as a tangible piece of that half-century of service.