Shipbuilding in Tampa — Tampa, Florida

Two waterfront sites carry most of Tampa's shipbuilding story. The older one sits on the Ybor Channel at the foot of Grant Street, where a foundry turned into Tampa Shipbuilding, the yard known as TASCO, and where Gulf Marine Repair works today. The younger one is on Hookers Point, on the Sparkman Channel side of the port, where a World War II concrete ship yard became the repair and construction yard now called Tampa Ship. Both sites belong to the industrial edge of a harbor that the City of Tampa credits for the city's commercial success, alongside the Hillsborough River and the phosphate shipping that boomed after the late 1880s.

Most of the yard by yard detail comes from the hull lists and company histories kept by the Naval Marine Archive, a Canadian maritime collection that tracks American shipbuilders. Those records show Tampa building ships in both World Wars, repairing them through the Cold War, and turning out offshore supply vessels as recently as 2018.

Tampa's shipbuilding began inside a machine shop. The archive's TASCO history traces the yard to the Tampa Foundry and Machine Co., which had been started in 1892 and incorporated in 1905, and which won a contract for the passenger ship Poughkeepsie in 1916. That vessel, a 207 foot passenger ship, was delivered from Tampa in May 1917.

The same year the business became Tampa Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. The wartime orders were small: the yard built only two ships for the World War I effort, the cargo ships War Wonder, delivered in September 1918, and War Work, delivered in March 1919. After that the Ybor Channel yard worked mainly as a repair yard for two decades, and the hull list records a Tasco dry dock with 10,000 long tons of lift capacity in 1937, the piece of equipment that later made the yard useful to the Navy.

On the eve of World War II the Tampa yard was chosen for the U.S. Maritime Commission's pre-war long range shipbuilding program, and it delivered the cargo ship Sea Witch in July 1940. The archive records that, shortly after starting work on its first contract, the company got into financial difficulties and was sold to George B. Howell, who renamed it Tampa Shipbuilding Company, or TASCO. Under that name it grew into the largest employer in Tampa, with 16,000 people at its peak.

The TASCO hull list shows a yard that built warships rather than freighters. It includes Maritime Commission ammunition ships, the first delivered in March 1941 and taken into the Navy as Lassen; three 520 foot destroyer tenders, Piedmont, Sierra and Yosemite, all delivered in 1944; a long run of Admirable class minesweepers in 1943 and 1944, many later transferred to the Soviet Union; a group of destroyer escorts; and the repair ships Amphion and Cadmus, finished in 1946. After the war the company took commercial work, including cargo ships for France, but it ceased operations by 1948.

The site then went to the Navy, which held it in reserve until after the Korean War, and was turned over to the Port of Tampa for other uses. A 2023 University of Central Florida master’s thesis, War on the Bay, studies how these Tampa shipyards changed the lives of the people who worked in them before, during and after the war.

Steel was the bottleneck. The archive's account of World War II concrete shipbuilders notes that the Maritime Commission turned to concrete reluctantly, only when steel yards were full. In 1942 McCloskey and Company developed a yard at Hookers Point in Tampa on land owned by the Tampa Port Authority, with 13 building ways and $7 million from the Commission. Its order was 24 self-propelled dry bulk ships to carry sugar, which the archive describes as the only self-propelled concrete ships, each 366 feet long with a deadweight of 5,000 tons.

The Hookers Point yard employed 6,000 workers. Its first deliveries, Vitruvius and David O. Saylor, came out in late 1943 and ended up sunk as breakwaters at Normandy; most of the rest became breakwaters at Kiptopeke, Virginia, and Powell River, British Columbia. In 1945 the Tampa yard switched to steel and built small N3 cargo ships such as Northern Warrior, several of which went to Britain, before it closed permanently in December 1945.

According to the archive's Tampa Ship history, the City of Tampa acquired the Hookers Point site from the War Assets Administration in January 1948 and leased it out year to year. The first major tenant, Tampa Ship Repair and Dry Dock Company with its subsidiary Tampa Fabricators, built Navy tank barges, Cuban sugar barges and offshore supply boats in the 1950s. Two of its Tampa jobs stand out: the Jose Gasparilla pirate ship for the Gasparilla Krewe in 1954, and nine replica Nautilus mini submarines for Disney World in 1971.

In 1972 the American Ship Building Company bought the operation after closing its Great Lakes yards and renamed it Tampa Shipyards, Inc. It converted a neighboring shrimp boat dock into two Panamax graving docks, giving Hookers Point four in all, and during the 1980s it converted Moore McCormack cargo ships to container ships and delivered five product carriers in 1985 and 1986. The company went bankrupt in 1995. After a brief period under a Greek owned subsidiary, the lease passed in 1997 to Tampa Bay Shipbuilding and Repair Company, which spent the following decade converting OSG America tank barges to double hulls at the Tampa yard.

The Hookers Point yard changed hands again in 2008. MarineLink reported in January 2009 that on November 18, 2008, Edison Chouest Offshore officials appeared before the Tampa Port Authority to take over Tampa Bay Shipbuilding and Repair's long term lease, creating Tampa Ship, LLC. The report described the only commercial shipyard between Pascagoula and Hampton Roads with four large graving docks, able to handle ships up to 150,000 deadweight tons, on more than 60 acres fronting the Sparkman Channel, with a workforce of 500 at the time.

Tampa Ship is part of North American Shipbuilding, which Edison Chouest Offshore wholly owns. The archive notes the yard is still primarily a repair facility with unusual fabrication capacity, and its hull list shows Tampa Ship delivering offshore supply vessels for Chouest from June 2012 through February 2018, with two harbor tugs listed as building in the January 2022 update. On the Ybor Channel, the old TASCO ground is occupied by Gulf Marine Repair, so both of Tampa's wartime shipyard sites remain working ship repair yards in 2026.