2018 Daily Photos

November 19, 2018 -- USS Little Rock

.
The USS Little Rock (CL-92/CLG-4/CG-4) is now a museum ship permanently anchored in the harbor at Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park, in Buffalo, New York. If you look carefully, you can see half the ship is a darker gray. That’s because she is currently undergoing a re-paint by volunteers and they are only partially completed on this side of the ship. All this re-paint work is being done by just two volunteers working by hand.

USS Little Rock was one of 27 United States Navy Cleveland-class light cruisers completed during World War II, and one of six to eventually be converted to guided missile cruisers. She was the first US Navy ship to be named for Little Rock, Arkansas. Commissioned in mid-1945, she was completed too late to see combat duty during World War II. After an initial South American cruise, she spent the next few years serving off the east coast of the U.S., in the Caribbean, and in the Mediterranean. Like all but one of her sister ships, she was retired in the post-war defense cutbacks, becoming part of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet in 1949.

In the late 1950s she was re-activated and converted to a Galveston-class guided missile cruiser, which involved removing all her aft six-inch and five-inch guns and rebuilding her aft superstructure to accommodate the Talos missile system. In her new career she served extensively in the Mediterranean, often as the Sixth Fleet flagship.

She was decommissioned for the last time in 1976 and is now a museum ship at Buffalo and

2018AnimalsBuffaloD750JuneMilitaryMNew YorkShipsTransportationTravelWatercraft