Long Beach Cruise Terminal
In 1983, the Wrather Corporation, operator of the Queen Mary, built the world’s largest, free-span aluminum geodesic dome near by to house a new attraction – Howard Hughes’s Hercules H4. The Flying Boat, or Spruce Goose as the press dubbed it, was designed by Hughes and built by Hughes Aircraft in 1947 to be the largest transport plane in the world. Hughes took the prototype out into Long Beach Harbor for its only flight on November 2, 1947. The H4 was stored in a warehouse on Pier E until it was moved to the dome in 1983. After the plane was moved to a museum in Oregon in 1992, the dome was used as a giant soundstage and a roller derby rink. Carnival Cruise Lines started using it as a luggage-handling facility in 2001 and took over the entire facility in 2016.
Long Beach, Los Angeles County
Photographer: John Bare