Things to Do at Uss Slater de 766

The USS Slater squats low and gray on Albany's Hudson River edge, her haze-gray hull slicing a warlike outline against the Empire State Plaza towers. Last destroyer escort still afloat in the United States, this Cannon-class warship was laid down at Tampa Shipbuilding Company on 9 March 1943, launched 13 February 1944, commissioned 1 May 1944. She carries the name of Frank Olga Slater, a sailor from Fyffe, Alabama, killed with ten shipmates on the antiaircraft platform of heavy cruiser USS San Francisco during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on 12 November 1942; all eleven earned posthumous Navy Crosses for keeping fire on an incoming bomber until it crashed onto their position. Lenora Slater, his mother, christened the ship on 20 February 1944. After Atlantic convoy runs shielding supply lines from U-boats and Pacific duty against Japanese submarines and kamikaze attacks, the Slater was decommissioned in September 1947, then transferred to Greece under the Truman Doctrine in 1951, serving as AETOS for four decades. She returned to the United States on 27 August 1993 as a gutted shell, and the scale of the restoration still hits you in every passageway. Volunteers scraped away thick Greek-era ceramic tile and grout to bare the original steel. Towed to Albany on 27 October 1997, the ship now thrives under Executive Director Tim Rizzuto. Roughly 120 active volunteers pour about 15,000 hours a year into keeping her close to her 1945 fighting trim. National Historic Landmark status came on 2 March 2012, and stepping aboard feels like joining a crew that could cast off tomorrow. The smell grabs you first: old steel, machine oil, salt air drifting off the Hudson. The ship runs 306 feet long, just over 36 feet wide, so below decks everything feels compressed, intimate, a quick lesson in how 216 sailors lived in wartime. Metal grating clangs underfoot, voices echo off steel, and on a summer afternoon the hull throws heat that turns lower compartments thick and close. You may find volunteers painting, grinding, or cooking dinner in the galley, a lived-in vibe most museum ships never reach.

The Slater sits on Albany's Hudson River waterfront, just south of the Dunn Memorial Bridge. If you're driving, a free parking lot sits right next to the ship, which is a pleasant surprise for downtown Albany. From the Amtrak station at Albany-Rensselaer, you're looking at about a five-minute drive across the river. Walking from the Empire State Plaza takes fifteen to twenty minutes heading south. But Interstate 787 cuts between downtown and the waterfront, so you'll want to use the Hudson River Way pedestrian bridge, which spans the highway and is worth the crossing on its own for the historical paintings mounted on its lampposts. CDTA buses serve the waterfront area as well.