USS Cassin Young (DD-793), a 1943 World War II-era Fletcher-class destroyer serving as a museum ship, is also berthed here.On 24 June 1833, the staff and dignitaries including then Vice President Martin Van Buren, Secretary of War Lewis Cass, Secretary of the Navy Levi Woodbury, and many Massachusetts officials, witnessed "one of the great events of American naval history": the early United States frigate Constitution was inaugurating the first naval drydock in New England designed by prominent civil engineer Loammi Baldwin Jr.[7] The ropewalk supplied cordage used in the Navy from the time it opened in 1837 until the Yard closed in 1975.[8] In the late 1880s and 1890s, the Navy began expanding again bringing into service new modern steel-hulled steam-powered warships and that brought new life to the Yard.During World War II (1939/1941–1945), it worked to fix British Royal Navy warships and merchant transports damaged by the Nazi Germans when crossing the North Atlantic Ocean.Even before the U.S. entered the Second World War after the Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December 1941, a month before in November, Boston was one of four United States naval shipyards selected to build Captain-class frigates under the Lend-Lease military assistance program for the Royal Navy.The campus of the MGH Institute of Health Professions occupies seven buildings in the Yard, including classroom, office, and clinical space.
Aerial view of the Boston Navy Yard in April 1960.