Boston Ship Repair setting up a Phila. operation

Boston Ship Repair Inc., which has worked on some of the world's largest cruise ships and other vessels during the last decade, is setting up a second operation in Philadelphia.

The new yard, to be called PennShip Service L.L.C., is expected to employ a core group of 200 workers, more at the peak of big projects, and to strengthen the region's maritime supplier and service companies. Final lease documents were being reviewed and signed yesterday.

PennShip is leasing the site next to the Aker Philadelphia Shipyard, which has delivered six new cargo ships since it began operations in 2000. Aker Philadelphia is now building three ships a year and has a backlog of new orders.

The sites are part of the old Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, which closed in 1996.

Boston Ship Repair has been owned for two years by Dimeling, Schreiber & Park L.P., a private-investment partnership based in Center City. Joseph E. Driscoll, a partner in the firm, declined to discuss plans. "There's very little to talk about until we get some business going. It's purely a start-up operation," he said.

But he said his partners were excited about the opportunity. He called the success of the adjacent shipyard "a wonderful story. Many thought we would never see a ship built here again. The hope is that we benefit each other."

For 10 years, ending last year, Metro Machine Corp., of Norfolk, Va., repaired Navy ships at the site PennShip will develop.

City and state officials had been actively seeking to replace Metro with a shipbuilding or ship-repair firm that would make the Aker shipyard a stronger magnet to attract maritime service and supply firms to the region.

PennShip has leased Drydock 3 and Pier 6 along with adjacent land, said John Grady, senior vice president of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., which manages the site for the city.

He declined to disclose terms of the lease, saying that information would help competitors in bidding situations.

Even before the lease was signed, maritime industry executives said PennShip was actively seeking ship-repair and overhaul work from commercial and government ship owners.

The drydock it is leasing is 984 feet long and 114 feet wide. It was built by the Navy before World War II and is one of the largest in the northeastern United States. Large ships are floated, massive gates are closed and then water is pumped out, allowing workers access to a dry hull, propulsion gear and rudder for repair, painting and overhaul.

The PIDC is looking for another maritime firm to develop the smaller Drydock 2 area, once part of the Metro Machine operation.

The PennShip deal is part of "our continued commitment to develop the industrial and maritime industrial assets that we acquired from the Navy," Grady said.

The Navy base and shipyard, on the Delaware River at the foot of South Broad Street, employed 11,000 shortly before the Pentagon announced in 1991 that it would close. The PIDC has in the last decade attracted about 75 companies to the site, a mix of industrial, office, distribution and research-and-development enterprises.

About 7,000 people now work at the old base, including 2,500 in Navy groups that remained active here - a large engineering complex, propeller shop, foundry and inactive-fleet maintenance unit.

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