USS Requin

The USS Requin--(which is French for "shark")--is a World War II submarine.  It's docked as a museum in the Ohio River, Pittsburgh.  It's not very photogenic, but definitely worth a visit.    

 The interior is too cramped to photograph without a decent camera, which I don't have.  And it stinks.  I can't identify the strange odor inside this boat, but it's similar to tar, and very pervasive.  It gets into your clothes, and you smell it on yourself a full half hour after disembarking.  

 Of course, there were shipyards in Pittsburgh from colonial times up until the 1950s.  WWII battleships were constructed here, then sailed down the Ohio and out to sea through the Gulf of Mexico.  The Dravo Corporation constructed many military vessels on Neville Island.  There's also a little river town on the Monongahela called "Dravosburg"; I suspect ship-building was their thing, too.  

 There was a lot of stuff to photograph inside, and I caught so little on my iPhone.  Knobs, and levers, and gauges, and valves.  But I was mostly drawn to the little indications that people aboard this vessel were just trying to live normal lives.  They had books, and pictures from home, and pin-up posters of girls with flat butts in big, shapeless bathing suits.  Not at all "sexy" by modern standards, but a few months canned up inside this thing, and your standards are bound to deteriorate.  

This is looking up one of the chutes into an upper level.  Many portions of the submarine are off limits to the public.