If you visited the Battleship NORTH CAROLINA a few years ago and came back recently, you may have noticed that a chunk of the parking lot is gone, replaced by a tidal marsh with a creek running through it. That change has a name, the Living with Water project, and the reason behind it is straightforward. The site was flooding so often that paving the problem over had stopped working. The engineering has a few moving parts, but the idea is simple, and it changes very little about how you actually park, walk in, and look at the ship.
The marsh where a parking lot used to be
Walk toward the Battleship from the river side now and the first thing that has changed is underfoot. Where there was once a low apron of asphalt that flooded on high tides, there is a shallow wetland threaded by a tidal creek, with marsh grasses, open water, and birds working the mud at the edges. Within days of the wetland being finished, herons and other shorebirds moved in, which the site took as a sign that fish had already found it too.
This is not a decorative pond. It is an intertidal wetland, meaning it floods and drains with the river’s tides by design, and it sits exactly where the worst of the parking flooding used to happen. The pavement that remains has been lifted and re-graded so cars stay dry, and the old hard edge along the water has been softened into a natural bank. The short version is that the Battleship stopped fighting the water in this corner of the property and gave it a place to go instead.
Why the Battleship had a flooding problem
The ship sits on Eagles Island, low ground on the west bank of the Cape Fear River directly across from downtown Wilmington. That spot is part of what makes a visit feel dramatic, with the Riverwalk and the city skyline on the far bank, but it also puts the memorial right at the level of a tidal river that keeps creeping higher.
The numbers are stark. According to PBS North Carolina’s reporting on the site, tidal flooding there has increased more than 7,000 percent since the Battleship arrived in 1961, with a 770 percent jump in the most recent full decade alone. In practical terms, that meant a parking lot that went underwater more and more often, water lapping at a ship that is itself a National Historic Landmark and a state memorial. For years the response was the usual one, pump it, patch it, repave it. By 2018, the leadership decided that approach had run out of road and went looking for a way to work with the water instead of walling it out. You can read the Battleship’s own account on its Living with Water project page.
What “Living with Water” actually built
The project, designed with the engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol, comes down to a few moves that work together.
The biggest is the wetland itself. Crews removed about two acres of impervious, flood-prone parking, the kind of solid pavement that sheds water instead of soaking it up, and rebuilt that ground as tidal creek and estuarine wetland. A wetland like this works as a sponge and a relief valve at once. It holds high water, filters runoff before it reaches the river, and creates habitat where there used to be a puddled parking lot.
Alongside it, more than 800 linear feet of hardened, bulkheaded shoreline was converted to a living shoreline. A living shoreline replaces a concrete or steel wall with a sloped, planted bank of marsh grass and natural material, which absorbs wave energy and rising water far better than a hard edge that the water simply climbs and overtops.
The parking that visitors still use was raised by up to three feet and given better drainage, including a bioswale, which is a planted, low channel that catches stormwater running off the lot and lets it filter into the ground rather than pooling on the asphalt. As of 2025 the elevated lot has stayed dry through the high tides that used to flood it, and the construction is largely complete. The work was paid for through a mix of public and conservation partners, including the North Carolina Land and Water Fund, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, NOAA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the USS NORTH CAROLINA Battleship Commission, and researchers from UNC Wilmington are tracking how the wetland performs on water quality and wildlife.
What it means for your visit
For most visitors, the practical effect is small and positive. You park on higher, drier ground than the lot offered a few years ago, and you walk past a genuine piece of working coastal restoration on your way to the gangway. It is worth slowing down for. The wetland and the living shoreline are right there along the path, free to look at whether or not you go aboard, and they give the riverbank a different character than a sheet of pavement ever did.
It also pairs well with the rest of a Battleship stop. If you are still sorting out the basics of hours, tickets, and what the self-guided tour is like, start with our guide to visiting the Battleship NORTH CAROLINA. Families in particular can use the marsh as an easy, low-key counterweight to the steep ladders and hot metal decks below; our piece on taking kids to the Battleship covers how to pace a visit, and a few minutes watching birds in the new wetland fits neatly into that plan.
A small marsh with a big job
The Living with Water project is easy to walk past without realizing what you are seeing, which is part of why it is worth pointing out. A flooding parking lot is a dull problem, and turning it into tidal wetland and a softened, planted shoreline is a quietly clever answer, one that keeps a beloved warship in place while letting the river do what rivers do. Next time you cross from downtown to the Eagles Island side, give the marsh a look. It is doing more work than it lets on.
FAQs
Can you still park at the Battleship NORTH CAROLINA?
Yes. The Living with Water project removed the lowest, most flood-prone section of the lot, but the remaining parking was raised and re-drained, so on-site parking is still part of a normal visit. The footprint is smaller than it used to be, so on the busiest event days (Ghost Ship in October, the Half Marathon in November) it pays to arrive early. Confirm current parking and payment details at battleshipnc.com/visit/.
Is the Battleship moving or leaving Wilmington because of the flooding?
No. The whole point of Living with Water is to keep the ship where it is, moored on Eagles Island across from downtown. Moving a 728-foot warship was never the plan, so the site re-engineered the ground around it to manage tidal flooding instead. There is no plan to move the Battleship out of Wilmington.
Will the new wetland stop the flooding for good?
It is designed to manage and absorb tidal flooding, not to guarantee a permanently dry site. Tides on the Cape Fear River keep rising, and the raised lot and wetland are meant to give the water somewhere to go. Researchers from UNC Wilmington are monitoring how well it performs over time, so the honest answer is that this reduces the problem and is being measured, not that flooding is solved forever.
