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Clayton Ship & Boat Building

Clayton NY

This shipyard is a bit of a mystery. Can anyone tell me who owned it, when it opened, when it closed? It was located, I think, on Theresa Street, where the marina is now.

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The Clayton Casino, once a ship-building factory, was on the corner of Mary and Theresa Streets. Popular during the big band era for dances and entertainment, it was later a bowling alley. The building was razed in 2007.

Touted as the “biggest nightclub between Montreal and Chicago,” by Clayton resident Marilyn Hutchinson in a 2008 Watertown Daily Times article, the Clayton Casino hosted numerous popular musicians, including Timmy and Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Paul Whiteman, in its heyday in the 1930s. It was “seven-days-a-week live entertainment,” Ms. Hutchinson said.

The popular nightclub, which was never a gambling sight, only enjoyed six to seven years of business before closing permanently in 1942 as traffic declined during World War II. The building, which was demolished in May 2008 with the idea that it would serve as a parking lot for a hotel that never came to fruition, originally housed Clayton Ship & Boat Building Corp., which manufactured 110-foot-long submarine chasers during World War I. It later became Frye and Denny Boatworks. In 1934, just after the 21st Amendment ended 13 years of Prohibition, Stewart and Mary Ormsby, of Belleville, and Westman LaLonde purchased the building and transformed it into the casino.

https://www.nny360.com/magazines/nnybusiness/features/the-day-the-music-died-no-gambling-at-the-clayton-casino-just-a-place-for/article_db485221-ef95-58c4-9b32-b23203fc34a4.html

O/N Customer Type Tons LOA Delivered Notes
YC-577 US Navy open lighter 115 1918
YC-578 US Navy open lighter 115 1918
YC-579 US Navy open lighter 115 1918
220283 SC-411 US Navy subchaser 135 110 May 1919 sold 1920 as Brunette, Sentinel, Romance
SC-412 US Navy subchaser 135 110 May 1919 to MARAD 1946
YT-53 US Navy tugboat 215 1919 sold in the 1920s
YT-54 US Navy tugboat 215 1919 sold in the 1920s
YT-55 US Navy tugboat 215 1919 sold in the 1920s
256588 Spray V passenger 10 50 1920
220297 Just Brown II passenger 40 63 1920 later Maxine II, Uncle Sam II
223698 Edith passenger 14 60 1924
223734 Miss Clayton passenger 25 64 1924
223787 Any Where passenger 23 48 1924
224707 Islander II passenger 15 48 1925 later Spray VI
226377 Miss Clayton II passenger 15 48 1927
228324 Miss St. Lawrence II passenger 8 43 1929
229789 Julia III passenger 10 47 1930 later Island Princess
237410 Miss Islander II passenger 12 62 1938 later Uncle Sam II

Printed from shipbuildinghistory.njscuba.net