Commercial Service
Stripped of her turrets and superstructure, the ship was towed to Beaufort, South Carolina, where she was used as a floating hotel. She was subsequently towed to Florida for the same purpose, and it was rumored that "a certain amount of fashionable gambling was carried out on board." Notorious gangster Al Capone was rumored to have been interested in the erstwhile warship.
Chartered by the government in 1943, the ship was towed via inland waters to Elizabeth City, where she provided housing facilities for the workers building a new naval air station there. Following World War II, she lay alongside a wharf at Georgetown, South Carolina, whence she was towed to Baltimore, Maryland, in the spring of 1950. She was placed into a slip dredged into the bank at Sandy Point, near where the new Chesapeake Bay Bridge was to be built, but business for a floating restaurant and hotel proved slow and she was sold again in the spring of 1951, and was taken to Baltimore. Plans to refit the ship for work supporting oil exploration in the Venezuelan oil fields came to naught, and the ship was sold to the Patapsco Steel Corp., Fairfield, Maryland. By the spring of 1952, the scrapping had been completed.
Read more about this topic: USS Amphitrite (BM-2)
Famous quotes containing the words commercial and/or service:
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