Ship Shaped

The USS Constitution has lived through three centuries, the birth of the nation, the civil war of the nation, two wars of the world, and all 43 presidents. Throughout that, it has been a boat, a schoolhouse, a sailor motel, and, now, a museum. A pope and a queen have been inside it. It has lived through so many crusty layers of history that it’s been renovated thrice, and had those layers removed and replaced. It left historical traces in wars in Europe and the Caribbean, and it has traces of North Carolina and Pennsylvania in it (all parts are from the East Coast). It has been in a constant state of fluctuation, riding the waves of time through rot and out. Today, we can still keep up with ongoing renovations with the "Constitution Cam" which uploads new live pictures of the ship every 20 minutes. 

Now, it sits in the Harbor in Charlestown, north of the North End, and quite far from the Boston Harbor, where other important historical events took place. 

The ship is a literal microcosm of the palimpsest nature of Boston - it has traversed the waters of history, and it has been both damaged by them, and renovated anew. The Blackwell Reader quote by Michel de Certeau, in "The Practice of Everyday Life," explains the inadvertent nature in which the USS Constitution became the oldest commissioned warship still in use today: "People moving through the city at ground level write the 'urban text' without being able to read it. The city is provisionally created as a patchwork quilt of individual viewpoints and opinions. The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order."

This quote highlights that people are unaware that they are moving around in a constantly changing environment, and that they are in fact the authors of the story of that environment. With respect to the USS Constitution, it has served as a symbol of victory for Boston and for America, and some of its text is highlighted by a few exclamation points. Specifically, when it won battles in the war of 1812, then when it was saved by two mass grassroots movement (page - Pennies for Old Ironsides), and when the eponymous museum was founded in 1972 years ago in Boston, making it a key Boston tourist destination.