Shrinking Ship : Priest Raises the Titanic, Down to Last Staircase, in Scale Model

Roberto Pirrone just became a priest. With his ordination came a vacation--two weeks to travel, relax and do whatever pleases him.

And what pleases Pirrone?

Tinkering with the 19-foot scale model of the luxury liner Titanic that he began building when he was 15.

For nearly a decade, the model has stood as the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Maritime Museum in San Pedro. Encased in glass, Pirrone’s Titanic is an awesome miniature, with moveable parts and precise features--including the ship’s pool, sauna and racquetball courts, the galleys and dining rooms and luxury cabins. To the hundreds of thousands of visitors who have seen the Titanic, it has no doubt appeared perfect.

Did Some Fine Tuning

But Pirrone, now 31, knows better.

He spent his two-week break retouching and rearranging the engine rooms and lower decks of the model to make it conform more accurately to new information about the sunken ocean liner. With his paintbrush in hand and plans by his side, he drew as much attention as the model.

“He is meticulous about this,” said museum executive director William Lee. “He did the same thing about a year ago. He came in and took the glass off and worked for a few days, changing some small details like the way that a railing was configured. It’s incredibly accurate and there are always people coming here who are considered experts in Titanic history who are amazed to find such an accurate rendition of the ship.”

Said Pirrone, who closed up shop Friday and reports to work Monday as an associate pastor at St. Finbar Catholic Church in Burbank: “I want the model to be as accurate as possible.”

Specs Unavailable

Unlike Pirrone’s subsequent model cruise ship endeavors--he also built the Lusitania, sunk by a German submarine in 1915, and is now beginning work on the Normandie, a French ship scrapped after it caught fire during World War II--there are no complete specifications available for the Titanic.

Most of the plans for the 882-foot-long, 45,000-ton ship were destroyed during World War II, according to Pirrone. And because the ship--which sank on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg--went down on its maiden voyage, photographs are limited.

Thus, Pirrone pieced together his model using available pictures, drawings and partial specifications, including those for one of the Titanic’s two sister ships, the Olympic.

Since he completed the model in 1977, a considerable body of new information has come out about the Titanic, especially after the discovery of the ship’s wreck in 1985. Pirrone said he has used aerial photos of the wreck to fix a few flaws: “Skylights that were missing, minor structural details the average person wouldn’t even care about, vents I didn’t know about.”

More recently, Pirrone obtained plans for the engine room and lower decks of the Britannic, the Titanic’s other sister ship. He used those plans to transform the neutral gray lower decks of his model to the Britannic’s colors--red, white and black. It is likely that these features were identical to the Titanic’s, although Pirrone acknowledges that he may never know for certain.

Such mysteries are part of Pirrone’s fascination with the doomed ocean liner. “It’s probably the most famous ship in the world,” he said. “But who knows what it looks like? No one.”

But it was the ship’s grand central staircase, with its plush red carpet, black and gold rails and magnificent domed top, that first sparked his interest as a boy. That, he said, and the fact that he was “lousy in sports.”

Pirrone, who began building model houses in his early teens, came across a description of the staircase in a book he was reading for school. “The book did not interest me,” he said. “The staircase did.” He decided to build the whole ship.

Working in his bedroom of the Monterey Park house where he grew up, it took Pirrone five years to complete the Titanic.

The model is built in four interlocking sections, mostly of scrap cardboard that Pirrone’s father brought home from work. “There are no special materials or hidden secrets,” he said. “The tools of my trade are a pair of scissors, an Exacto knife blade and a ruler.”

And a good memory. Pirrone can rattle off details of the Titanic’s construction with ease: The ceilings were 12 feet, 3 inches at their highest; the main dining room had 458 chairs (his model, a cutaway, has half that number); the combination reciprocating and turbine engine was “unusual for that era.”

When the maritime museum opened in 1980, it took the Titanic model as one of its first exhibits. The museum accepted the Lusitania in 1986, and Lee said he looks forward to displaying the Normandie when it is completed.

Those later models could remain encased in glass, untouched, forever. As for the Titanic, Pirrone knows there will always be work to do. Friday, he was already talking about a return visit to the museum to finish his remodeling of the engine room.

“I have three quarters of the engine space complete,” he reported. “I still have to do the generator rooms and the shaft tunnels.”

And when might that be?

“My next vacation will be after Christmas.”