Museum Review - Turner Joy

This is a first, but hopefully not a last. While on my quest to see the Coast Artillery Museum before it closed, I took a few hours to stop in Bremerton and see the destroyer Turner Joy, as well as the Puget Sound Navy Museum a couple blocks away. But while I've reviewed a lot of museums, and even in some cases reviewed a ship twice, what makes this unique is that reader Evan Þ reviewed it four years ago, giving me an opportunity to compare my take on the ship to his.

Website

First, some logistical bits to get out of the way: if you're coming from Seattle, Turner Joy is a short walk from the terminus of the Bremerton-Seattle ferry. If you're not, you need to find parking in downtown Bremerton, because neither museum has its own parking lot. I would recommend the former, if possible, because the later is annoying and/or expensive.

The Damage Control section aboard, a nice display of DC gear

As for Turner Joy herself, I walked in expecting her to be nice but sort of underwhelming. I've toured a couple destroyers, and never been all that impressed, because on a ship that's under 5,000 tons, there just isn't enough ship to get a really satisfying experience. Or so I thought. Turner Joy managed to handily beat expectations, solving this problem by doing another thing I didn't think would turn out well: making sure everything is open. This appears to be the goal of a lot of museum ships (Massachusetts, Midway and Alabama all spring to mind) and I generally think it's a mistake. If the ship is that big, it's easy for visitors to get lost or overwhelmed, and even I'm getting old enough that I start to feel it after 4-5 hours onboard. My take on this may be influenced by the fact that I got my start on Iowa, the only major museum ship which has consciously taken the other tack, deliberately building a 2-hour tour route for the average visitor, even if it means skipping a bunch of cool stuff. But it turns out that when you really open up a small ship and add excellent signage, the result is kind of magical.

One of many examples of excellent signage

Because Turner Joy is open in ways that I've never seen approached. One of the crew claimed 90%, and while I'm not sure exactly how that would be measured, it feels about right. Even writing this review hours later, I can't think of a single space I would seriously have wanted to see that I couldn't. Maybe the view of the officer's pantry wasn't great, and you couldn't get into the chain locker itself, but those are really minor niggles. And, even better and more importantly, they've done a really inspired job using the ship they have, particularly with I think the best signage I've ever seen on a ship.¹ Two things they did that I particularly liked were studding the berthing spaces with "Who slept here?" signs that let them talk about all of the various ratings the Navy has and putting signs outside many closed hatches with pictures of what is on the other side. I'm sort of kicking myself for not thinking of either of those, and other ships should copy both ideas, pronto.

The sonar room

Hand-in-hand with the signage is the fact that they cover all aspects of the ship's operation. Everything from the guns and torpedoes to the mail room, offices, and sonar suite. The only thing I don't remember having particularly good signage was the galley, and I was moving pretty fast and might have just overlooked it. And, as someone with an eye on "what would it be like to take people through this ship?" the signage would have made it a lot easier to do that, because while I may know things, getting everything out of your brain and into your mouth at the right time is hard unless you've had time to build up a tour, which you can't do on a ship you only visit every few years. There were lots of signs that I could easily have glanced at, then talked about for a couple minutes with the reminder. I was only aboard for maybe 75 minutes, but could easily have gone twice that if I'd been reading a lot of the signs or taking someone curious through. And there were some cool touches, like a shell suspended in netting, allowing visitors to get a sense of how heavy it was without the possibility of dropping it.

A display at the Puget Sound Navy Museum

Turner Joy is just outside Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, which has its own museum, less than a 10-minute walk away. And, unfortunately, it's nowhere near as good. It's in a building that dates back to 1896, and started life as the administrative headquarters of the new Navy Yard. The ground floor is a small museum on the history of the shipyard, and there are some neat artifacts, but I was hoping for some serious detail on the technical side of the shipyard, and in that, I was disappointed. Upstairs, they have a section on life aboard a carrier, which is pretty clearly designed to give sailors whose families are visiting a chance to explain what their life is like without having to actually bring them aboard the ship. It wasn't bad, but it was very basic. There's also a a couple galleries with rotating collections. When I was there, one of them was on fashion in the Navy, and there were some interesting bits on the way sailors had modified their uniforms, but it didn't really go into the evolution of naval uniforms, instead spending a lot of time on the ways in which naval clothing has entered civilian fashion. Cynically, that's because the pictures of that are a lot easier to find.

On the whole, I don't regret visiting the museum (particularly because, like most Navy museums, it's free) but I wouldn't hurry through Turner Joy to go see it, and I would think twice before extending my parking session for it. The only really cool thing they have is outside, where they've gotten the sail of Parche, the most decorated ship in the history of the US Navy, for her long career of sneaking around and tapping other people's cables. That was pretty cool. It's also not the only ship part around there. Just north of Parche's sail, there's a park thing with a bit of history of the shipyard and the very tip of the bow of the nuclear cruiser South Carolina. There's a decent chance you'll go past it on the way back to your car.