Independence Seaport Museum

Explore Philadelphia’s maritime history at the Independence Seaport Museum, featuring historic ships like the USS Olympia and USS Becuna.

Planning your visit

The Independence Seaport Museum sits on Penn's Landing on the Delaware, where William Penn's colonists landed and where Philadelphia's shipping trade operated for two centuries. The museum covers that maritime history, the Delaware River watershed, and the immigrant arrivals that came through the port, alongside a working boat shop where traditional wooden craft are built and restored by volunteers.

Two historic vessels are moored alongside and are the main draw. USS Olympia is the oldest steel warship still afloat anywhere — Commodore Dewey's flagship at Manila Bay in 1898, and the ship that carried the American Unknown Soldier home from France in 1921. Her engine rooms, officers' quarters and gun decks are open, and the Victorian-era fittings make her feel considerably older than her steel hull suggests. USS Becuna, a Second World War submarine that later served through the Cold War, sits beside her and is claustrophobic in the way submarines invariably are.

Olympia's preservation has been financially precarious for years, which gives visiting a certain urgency.

Allow two hours for museum and both vessels. Bookable options combine them. Current availability is listed below.