WASHINGTON — Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro highlighted a site selection ceremony for the future of the National Museum of the United States Navy on Oct. 18.
“This is a moment of immense pride and anticipation for the Navy, for our nation, and for all who cherish maritime heritage,” Del Toro said, standing near two dilapidated buildings that will be part of the new museum campus.
The site is adjacent to the Navy Yard in Washington and a short walk from the current Navy museum, housed in an aging facility largely off-limits to the general public. The new museum is intended to be a state-of-the-art look at the U.S. Navy, will be open to the public and is near a vibrant neighborhood that also boasts the stadiums for the Washington Nationals baseball team and the DC United, DC Power FC and Washington Spirit soccer teams. It’s expected to attract up to two million visitors annually, well over the 100,000 annual attendance of the current museum, most of whom are already in the Navy.
Del Toro said he is well aware of the draw of Nationals Stadium, and said “I want half of them over here before the game and after the game.”
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district’s congressional representative, highlighted the city’s historic ties to the Navy. She said 30,000 city residents are veterans and “deserve the full equality of statehood,” as district residents don’t have voting rights in Congress.
A Long Road Ahead
While service officials now know where the museum will be located, they haven’t yet raised the money, don’t know what it will look like and don’t yet know what artifacts will be in it. All of those efforts are underway by the organizations that will create it: the Navy Museum Development Foundation that will raise the money ($475 million or more) and construct the building and the Naval History and Heritage Command that will select what goes in it. Once the museum is built, the foundation will give it to the Navy, which will staff and operate it.
Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox (retired), director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, gently poked fun at the museums of the Marine Corps and Army, which he described as being “out in the wilds of Virginia” while the new Navy museum will be next to an all-hours neighborhood.
The new museum, still years away — a groundbreaking is tentatively planned for next October and the first phase likely won’t open until 2030 — has already been a long time coming. Nina Albert, D.C.’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development, was one of the speakers at the event and noted she had served on a Navy museum site selection committee 17 years ago.
“The vision will be worth the work and it will be worth the wait,” she said.
Part of the delay was a prolonged and what Cox called “tortuous” process to acquire the land from the city in a swap that saw the Navy Yard give up some of its land on the other side of the base near the river to acquire the plot that will house the new museum.
The museum will ultimately be 240,000 square feet and filled with meaningful artifacts, such as the bell from the USS Jacob Jones, sunk in 1917 off the coast of Cornwell, England, by a German U-boat and rediscovered in 2022. It was the first U.S. Navy destroyer sunk by enemy action. The bell, recovered by the British Ministry of Defence and transferred to the U.S. Navy earlier this year, is being prepared for display, said Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James J. Kilby.
The museum is carrying high hopes for Navy officials. Former Secretary of the Navy Kenneth J. Braithwaite II said “it will not be a musty old hall with a bunch of old artifacts … it will be the spark that will draw people to the service of our country in the uniform of the United States Navy. This will be a new crown jewel in this city.”
