How the Intrepid Moved a World War II Fighter Plane

New York Times

13-03-2025

Good morning. It's Thursday. Today we'll find out how a World War II fighter-bomber was squeezed into an exhibition space on the former aircraft carrier Intrepid. We'll also get details on new census data that show that the population of New York City is growing again.
'It was like moving a couch into your New York City apartment,' Jessica Williams said, except that the item in question had no pillows or cushions and no pull-out bed to sleep on. And there was no super insisting it would never fit.
Williams, the head curator of the Intrepid Museum, was explaining how dicey it had been to transport a 33-foot fighter-bomber from World War II. The aircraft was not going far, just from the Intrepid's restoration hangar, on the former aircraft carrier's flight deck, to the hangar deck two levels below.
New York is a city where impossibly large objects squeeze through impossibly small spaces when moving day comes — somehow, grand pianos are shoehorned into elevators. But size is relative. On a ship like the Intrepid, which is roughly 890 feet long, a few feet shorter than the height of the office tower at 425 Park Avenue, so many spaces seem extra-extra-large.
The Intrepid's elevator originally had a wide-mouthed opening. The fighter-bomber being moved, a Corsair on loan from the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Fla., would have gone in and out easily, as aircraft did during World War II. 'The whole design of this ship was to facilitate the movement of aircraft,' Williams said, 'but now it's a museum, so of course we've changed things.'
The elevator now has a vertical support that was not there during World War II — a mullion, according to Williams, who was trained in historic preservation. That reduced the clearance for the Corsair to inches.
Before it could go anywhere, it had to be 'rigged up on skates' for the trip, and an airplane already on the hangar deck had to be moved out of its path. A huge propeller on display, one of four that originally drove the Intrepid, was also lifted out of the way.
The movers, a team from the Intrepid's restoration center, rehearsed with a scale model of the plane, the elevator and the hangar deck. 'Initially the assumption was that it would go in tail first,' Williams said, 'but then upon testing with the model, it made more sense to have it go nose first.'
Then the serious wiggling began. 'Jockeying,' Richard Skolnick, an aircraft restoration specialist on the Intrepid, called it, looking as if he was doing a little dance move.
Williams held her breath, but the plane squeezed through. Skolnick and his colleagues reattached the wings and raised them until they looked like a pair of praying hands that almost touched the ceiling. Movable flaps on the wings had to be reinstalled. Along the way, the plane had to be jacked up a bit to make room for axle stands. It can't just sit there on its tires — the tires are old.
The Intrepid's restoration center gave the plane a new paint job to honor Alfred Lerch, a Navy pilot who flew from the Intrepid during the 82-day Battle of Okinawa in 1945. On one of his first combat missions, Lerch shot down seven Japanese aircraft, making him an ace in a day.
Later that same day, a kamikaze dived into the Intrepid, and the ship went to a shipyard in California for repairs. When it went back in service several months later, Lerch flew one last strike mission. And then the war ended.
At the Intrepid museum, the Corsair will be the first thing visitors see when they reach the hangar deck.
'It cements the idea about the purpose of this sort of ship, its role as a military airfield and how the whole ship was built to manage and service these aircraft,' she said. 'Coming face to face upon entering reminds everyone what the ship is and what was at stake for the people who served on it.'
Expect mostly cloudy skies with mild winds and a high near 48 degrees. In the evening, it will be mostly cloudy with temperatures in the low 40s.
In effect until Friday (Purim).
The latest New York news
'People clearly want to be here'
Five years after the pandemic — and the disturbing drop in population that it set off — New York is growing again. New census data put the population at 8.48 million in July 2024, up from 8.39 million in July 2023 but still well below the peak of 8.8 million in early 2020.
The census figures indicate that fewer people are leaving the city, countering losses that deepened in the early months of the pandemic, when thousands of New Yorkers packed up and fled. Many have moved back. But the growth between 2023 and 2024 — about 87,184 people — largely reflected a steady increase in newcomers from other countries.
New York has long relied on immigrant newcomers to replace residents who left. 'That's the secret to New York City's demographic success,' said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
But during the first Trump administration, beginning in 2017, there was a decline in immigrants moving to the city, Professor Mollenkopf said. 'It remains to be seen how Trump 2 crimps international migration, and that may temper that force in increasing the city's population.'
The new census numbers notably revised last year's estimate to show that the city grew between 2022 and 2023 for the first time since the pandemic. Between 2023 and 2024, Manhattan grew by about 1.7 percent — the most of any borough. Its total population increased for a third straight year, to 1.66 million.
The other boroughs also grew — Brooklyn and Queens by nearly 1 percent each, the Bronx and Staten Island by less than 1 percent. Staten Island has fully erased its pandemic slide, the only borough to do so.
'Despite everything the city has had to overcome in recent years, people clearly want to be here,' said Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan think tank that researches policy issues facing cities.
Good seat
Dear Diary:
My husband and I got tickets for 'Take Me Out' when it first played in New York in the early 2000s.
We had seats close to the stage, and I started a conversation with a woman sitting to my right who had a thick Texas accent.
She and a male colleague were on a business trip and had gotten last-minute tickets that were unfortunately not next to each other.
She and I discussed the play. With a twinkle in her eye, she said her colleague had given her the seat closest to the stage so she would have a better view during the nude scenes. They planned to switch at intermission.
At the start of the first nude shower scene, I felt a poke in my ribs. I turned to look at my new friend, who was nodding at me with a big grin.
She did not switch seats at intermission.
— Elka Grisham
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Natasha Cornelissen and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [e-mail].
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