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The Fight to Save America’s Last Great Ocean Liner
This rust bucket is the SS United States, a once glorious vessel now moored next to a South Philadelphia shopping mall, where it’s been sitting in decay for 18 years, racking up roughly $60,000 a month in rent. Paint is peeling off its hull. The interior, stripped of previously asbestos-laden innards, is mostly bare. It doesn’t look like it now, but it is possibly the most impressive watercraft ever produced by the United States.
Active from 1952 to 1969, the SS US carried civilians between America and Europe quickly, safely, and comfortably. In the late 1960s, the booming airline industry, equipped with the jumbo Boeing 747, rendered the ocean liner obsolete*. After nearly two decades in Philly, the ship has run up a huge tab and the SS United States Conservancy, a group that bought the ship in 2011 and intends to preserve it, is running out of money. If they don’t raise more funds soon, they’ll likely have to cede ownership, at which point it’ll likely be sold to the highest-bidding scrap dealer. “She is a very much endangered piece of American history,” says Thomas Basile, an adviser to the Conservancy. “We could be within a month of having to decide her state.”
A Marvelous Design
The history of the SS US dates back to 1916, when William Francis Gibbs, whose naval architecture firm later designed more than half the American armored ships used in World War II, started working on the ship’s design. He spent the next 40 years overseeing its completion, up to its 1952 maiden voyage. The U.S. military got involved and financed two thirds of the $78 million ($780 million in 2014) construction costs near the end of the process, when Gibbs pitched the ship as a way to bring hundreds of thousands of soldiers home from Europe.
Except for a few men in uniform moving between overseas posts, the SS US was never converted to a full-scale troop-carrier, but with the threat of the Soviet Union looming in the postwar years, it was good to know there was a way to move 14,000 soldiers over 10,000 miles of ocean without stopping to refuel.
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/the-fight-to-save-americas-last-great-ocean-liner/#x
* As noted in the commentary, it was the 707 and the DC-8, not the 747, that cut transatlantic travel from days to hours.
I was privileged to be a passenger on the United States after living with my family in Europe for two years. It's distressing to view the state she's in now.
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Last edited Tue Sep 9, 2014, 11:29 AM - Edit history (1)
It went to the scrap yard decades ago. It served their young family well, and I remember camping trips taken in it fondly. It was a good, utilitarian vehicle that survived until the early 1960s. Then, its wheezy flathead six engine threw a rod and the car took its final journey to the local wrecking yard, where it was converted to scrap metal to be used, perhaps, in a new car. It looked just like this one:
The SS United States is of the same vintage. It will never ply the Atlantic seaways again. Time to scrap it and use its massive quantities of steel for other purposes. That's its best use at this time.
That's my opinion.
