The Queen Mary is officially open for public tours — sparking excitement about what’s to come

Long Beach’s historic World War II-era ship, the Queen Mary, finally reopened for public tours on Saturday, April 1, after a three-year closure — marking the first event in what officials say will be a grand reopening slated to kick off in the coming weeks.

Groups of about 30 people each gathered on the ship’s Promenade Deck starting at about 11 a.m. on Saturday to partake in their choice of three different tours: The Glory Days Historical Tour, the Haunted Encounters Tour and the Steam & Steel Tour — each which take about an hour and are available until 6 p.m. daily.

For some, including Gail Hurst — a tourist from England — Saturday’s reopening offered a chance to experience the ship for the first time. Hurst and her husband decided to visit the Queen Mary on a whim, as their trip with Princess Cruise Line boarded just across the parking lot from the vessel.

“My mom and dad had their 40th wedding anniversary on it — so we got to see where they were for the first time,” Hurst said in an interview after disembarking from her tour of the ship. “It was fabulous. We plan (to visit again) if we ever come to America.”

The ship’s operators, Evolution Hospitality, initially announced that the ship would re-open to the public earlier this week.

Long Beach city officials and Evolution, which took over the ship’s day-to-day management last June, have been working to revitalize the vessel after it fell into massive disrepair under its previous operator, Urban Commons.

The Queen Mary initially closed to the public because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 — but a 2021 city audit found that Urban Commons had not completed $23 million dollars worth of repairs, which the city had funded. Urban Commons forfeited its 66-year lease on the ship that same year, bringing the Queen Mary back under city control for the first time in nearly 40 years.

After the City Council approved the new management contract with Evolution last year, both found that several critical repairs needed to be completed before the Queen Mary could reopen to the public. Those included replacing the ship’s boilers, elevators and restrooms, repairing the plumbing, and upgrading parking.

Those fixes have been underway since last year — but are finally close to being finished, according to Steve Caloca, the Queen Mary’s managing director.

The installation of new boilers, heat exchangers, and a new emergency generator — which are necessary to have hot water on board and ensure the ship’s safety in the case of an emergency — should be complete within the next few days, Caloca said in a Saturday interview.

And other repairs — including aesthetic fixes all around the Queen Mary — are currently underway.

“All of the main hall floor is going to be redone,” Caloca siad. “The Promenade Deck, all of those those floors, have been restored to the original teak  — and we probably have just another 200 feet to go.”

But the ongoing nature of those repairs didn’t seem to bother 7-year-old Tristan Rodriguez — whose fascination with ships prompted his parents book a time slot on the Steam & Steel tour on Saturday afternoon.

“We’ve been checking in on the refurbishment just because he (Tristan) got really interested and wanted to come and see this,” Tristan’s mom, Elianny Rodriguez, said. “We kept checking back and just waiting for it to reopen.”

The younger Rodriguez has been fascinated with all things engineering since he was just two-years-old, according to his mom. He’s gone so far as to create piece-by-piece replicas of famous ships — including the Queen Mary — in Minecraft from scratch, a skill he picked up by watching YouTube tutorials.

“We wanted to check out like the steam engine when (Tristan) saw the tour because we knew how much he was into them,” Rodriguez said, “And (we knew) it would teach us facts about certain ships that we weren’t even aware of so we could talk about it with him.”