South Weymouth NAS Wooden Hangar Site

There were two blimp hangars at the South Weymouth Naval Air Station, established during WWII. One was steel, and was torn down in 1966. The second blimp hangar on base was similar to the 1,000-foot-long wooden types built around 1943, when steel was being rationed. It was torn down in the 1950s to make room for air base runways; however much of its floor remains visible in the grass, with rail tracks down the middle, as was common in these hangars. In 1944, the South Weymouth Naval Station was the starting point for early transatlantic crossings of non-rigid airships. In March 1957, the Snow Bird took off from South Weymouth on a record-breaking journey, crossing the Atlantic twice, and landing in Key West, after 11 days aloft, covering 9,500 miles without refueling. It marked the pinnacle of a blimp’s capabilities. In 2016, a portion of Boston’s Boylston Street was built on the old runways, for filming the explosion scenes for the movie Patriots Day, about the 2013 Boston marathon bombing. Just a few facades of the set remain there today. The green strip at the top is to aid in the digital compositing of the upper stories of the buildings. Another set was constructed nearby as a replica of the residential street in Watertown where the police hunted for and found the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (who is now on Death Row at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado).