Quincy has its share of icons, from the stately Adams family home and the Church of the Presidents to the architectural grace of the Thomas Crane Public Library. But one landmark stands above all the rest – and soon it will be a memory, when the Goliath crane at the old Fore River shipyard is dismantled and taken away to a Romanian shipyard.
Tall as a small skyscraper, long as a football field and massive as many of the ships that were once built there, Goliath’s gray steel frame captures the eye from the air, road and almost any hilltop with a clear view. Once the largest such cranes in the Western Hemisphere, it is also the last monument to an industry that defined Quincy for 70 years. Overhead Crane Single Girder
Goliath’s removal inspires sighs of nostalgia from former shipyard workers or anyone who has grown up or grown old seeing it. Still, no one seems to have tried to save it.
Preserving the crane would have been a long shot at best. Industrial structures rarely qualify for historic registers, and any application would have needed the support of the shipyard’s current owner, Quincy auto dealer Daniel Quirk.
In any event, Quirk’s planning director John Dobie said the issue of Goliath’s preservation was never raised in community meetings in 2005 about Quirk’s redevelopment plan.
“A few people said, it’s too bad you couldn’t save it,” Dobie said. “But I think most people realized its time had come.”
Former shipyard workers and other local residents who’ve grown up and grown old with Goliath have about a month to view the crane as they’ve seen it since it went up in 1975, when General Dynamics owned the yard.
Noticeable removal will be underway by mid-June. By mid-July, it will be in pieces and on a barge heading across the Atlantic. This comes five years after Quirk bought the yard at auction and five months after he sold the crane to Daewoo Mangalia Heavy Industries, a Romanian subsidiary of South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering.
Greg Nordholm, the president of Norsar, the Seattle company that’s supervising the move, said heavy equipment for the takedown will arrive by barge around May 20. Lift towers will be erected to hold Goliath’s massive crossbeam in place. Concrete foundations and pilings to anchor those towers have already been laid.
Once the towers are in place, the A-frame legs will then be cut apart – a 20-foot section first, from the bottom up, then 80-foot pieces.
As that’s done, the lift towers will gradually lower the crossbeam until it’s on the ground. The beam will stay in one piece for delivery to the Romanian shipyard.
Having built and dismantled scores of shipyard and construction cranes, Nordholm said the Goliath project is “a bit special and sad.”
“I’ve met so many people whose brother or father worked for the shipyard,” he said.
As monuments go, Goliath isn’t even old.
General Dynamics built the crane to lift 120-foot-diameter spheres for liquefied natural gas into tanker hulls. It was in use barely a decade before the company surrendered to overseas competition and closed the yard for good in 1986.
Greek shipbuilder Sotirios Emmanouil stirred hopes for a revival in the late 1990s, when he modernized the site and repaired Goliath for the oil tanker construction he envisioned. Then he defaulted on federal loans before a single keel was ever laid, and Goliath has gathered fresh rust ever since.
Quirk has proposed a “live, work and play” development for the 110-acre property, with a mix of apartments and condos, retail stores and other business. He hasn’t been able to start, though, because the site is zoned for maritime use. A bill to eliminate that zoning is now in committee study in the Legislature.
Whatever Quincy residents’ wishes for Goliath might be, the Massachusetts Historical Commission says the structure probably couldn’t have been preserved as a historic landmark.
Industrial property can be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, though they usually must be at least 50 years old. Some of the 19th century locks and canals at Lowell’s old textile mills are on the register, as is a steam engine at an MWRA water works in Brighton.
There are exceptions, but a structure like Goliath can’t be nominated if the owner objects. And Dobie said Quirk had no interest in pursuing the historical designation. Even if there was a community campaign, Dobie said Goliath’s size would have posed a financial daunting obstacle.
“It’s big, metal and rusting,” Dobie said. “The maintenance cost would be astronomical.”
But he said there is one consolation: At least Goliath now will be put back in use, even if it’s some 4,500 miles from Quincy.
“It’s going to be in a real shipyard,” Dobie said. “We’re happy it’s finding a good home.”
Lane Lambert may be reached at llambert@ledger.com.
Goliath lives up to name
- 3,000 tons, weight of Goliath crane. The central girder weighs 1,200 tons.
- 30 stories high, or 328 feet, the crane’s height. The two legs are 300-feet high.
- 390 feet, Goliath’s length, or span.
- 1,200 tons, how much it can lift.
- 1986 was the last year the crane was used in the Fore River shipyard.
- $40 million the cost to build a new crane like Goliath, according to Perfection Machinery.
- $10 billion sales in 2008 for Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering.
Cantilever Gantry - $1 billion in pending orders at the Mangalia shipyard, where Goliath is headed, reports the Rompress Romanian news agency.