Salvage Work in the Hudson Long Before the Costa Concordia Took on Water

The last name painted on the grand liner, christened the S.S. Normandie in 1932 and being converted into a troopship called the U.S.S. Lafayette a decade later, was Lipsett, in large white letters.

The repainting was a publicity stunt by the New York City company hired to scrap the French-built ship after it burned in a spectacular blaze at a West Side Manhattan pier in February 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor required its wartime use.

Marcia Warner, daughter of Morris Lipsett, one of the owners of the company, said Monday that removing the 40,000 tons of steel surviving from the hull and what remained of the decks after the ship had been righted by the Navy and private contractors “was hard to do.”

“My father was very positive, and it was not his style to say it was tough,” Ms. Warner said in an interview. “It might have occurred to him, but he wouldn’t say it.”

On Monday, engineers in Italy began the difficult task of raising the wreck of the 951-foot-long Costa Concordia cruise liner off the island of Giglio, where it ran aground on a granite reef 20 months ago, killing 32 people. The operation recalled the perilous raising of the Normandie, which, when it entered service in 1935, was the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat.

“There is no glamour now about what was once the pride of France,” Robert Wilder wrote in The New York Sun in 1942 after the United States Navy decided to raise the burned hulk for salvage.

At the time of the fire, the Normandie was being turned into a troopship to carry 12,000 passengers. Sabotage was suspected, but according to the official account, sparks from a welder’s torch ignited life preservers and set the ship ablaze. It capsized next to Pier 88 at West 48th Street and the Hudson River.

The Normandie was big - 1,029 feet, or over three football fields, long. The diameter of both tubes of the Holland Tunnel could fit in one of its three funnel smokestacks. It listed to port, then rested at an 80-degree angle and lodged in rock and mud after firefighters pumped in water to douse the blaze and save the adjacent 1,000-foot-long pier. The Concordia was at a similar angle before it started to be righted.

A Navy team recommended that the Normandie be raised and salvaged. First the superstructure - about 5,000 tons’ worth - above the promenade deck was dismantled. A mile and a half of timbers was used to shore up the decks. Watertight compartments were sealed and 350 tons of patches were applied in preparation for pumping out the water and refloating the ship.

Faced with a shortage of divers to work on the Normandie, the Navy established a training school. On average, 700 men worked on the ruin on any given day. There were accidents, but no fatalities.

The operation took 17 months until the ship was refloated and towed to a dry dock in Brooklyn. And just as the efforts around the Concordia have attracted many onlookers, large crowds lined the waterfront in Manhattan and New Jersey to watch the work to right the Normandie.

The operation cost an estimated $4.5 million, or about $65 million in today’s dollars (raising the Costa Concordia is projected to cost at least $800 million).

In his book “Normandie,” Harvey Ardman wrote that the 20-mile trip from Brooklyn to Port Newark, where the ship was to be scrapped, lasted five hours. “In her five seasons on the Atlantic, the great liner had traveled 445,000 miles,” he wrote. “In the last eight years of her life she traveled less than 50 miles, all in New York Harbor and all in tow.”

The scrapping of the ship was completed at the end of 1947. Two thousand tons of Belgian paving blocks, used as ballast, was sold to a New Jersey contractor for streets and homes.

The steering wheel wound up at the South Street Seaport Museum. Relics of the ship can be found on eBay - a Christofle ice bucket is for sale for $1,700. But the most enduring memories of the liner are its storied luxury and the complex job of righting, refloating and dismantling it. The steel was hauled away by rail to mills in Pennsylvania and melted into components of automobiles, building girders and appliances.

“In a very real way, then,” Mr. Ardman wrote, “Normandie is still with us, spread out all over America, being recycled again and again, her identity gone forever.”