South Weymouth NAS Steel Hangar Site

In September 1941, work started on what was to become the Naval Air Station South Weymouth, south of Boston, Massachusetts. This was the first of the eight blimp bases built during WWII. Though blimp operations stopped in the 1950s, the base continued to be developed and used by the Navy until 1997. After the base closed, the Navy transferred its land to the surrounding towns in pieces, over the following 20 years, as there was considerable contamination and environmental work to be performed. The site is now mostly in the changing hands of developers, who plan a major mixed use project, with retail, offices, and thousands of homes in a dense new urbanist community, served by circulating driverless cars. The first blocks of condominiums opened in 2011. The site is still dominated by the fading remnants of the air base, including hundreds of acres of former runways, and a large circular paved blimp landing area, now used as a logistics site for new vehicles being imported into the Boston region. The main blimp hangar was commissioned and designed in 1941, before Pearl Harbor and steel rations, so it was made in the old style of the steel blimp hangars of the 1930’s. It was demolished in 1966, but its oblong outline with curved ends is still visible, though partially consumed by new roads. On the ground, the old track, which clamshell doors rolled on, at either end, is still visible, for the time being.