Veterans Stadium

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1988

Born in Maryland in 1779, Stephen Decatur spent his boyhood in a house that once stood on this Philadelphia site before rising to become one of the young U.S. Navy's most celebrated officers. He made his name in the Tripolitan War of 1804, captured HMS Macedonian in 1812, and helped bring the Barbary powers to heel in 1815. His bold career ended in 1820 when he was killed in a duel and laid to rest at St. Peter's Church.

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.

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.

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.