The world’s fastest ocean-liner, Titanic-sized super-ship
the S.S. United States, once ferried presidents, Hollywood mega-stars, and even
the Mona Lisa. Yet this mammoth and noble craft may soon be relegated to the
junk heap. A preservationist group saved the vessel from being scrapped a few
years ago and is now working with a developer to give the mothballed behemoth
new life as a stationary waterfront real estate development in New York City,
the ship’s home port in her heyday.
Those
plans, however, may themselves be scrapped due to a lack of money. In fact, the
S.S. United States Conservancy has recently authorized a ship broker to explore
her potential sale to a recycler. The “Big U,” as the ship is called, is longer
than three football fields. It was a marvel of technology and elegance
throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, and offered regular passenger service between
New York and Europe. Her maiden voyage, in 1952, broke trans-Atlantic speed
records. She was so fast, in fact, that her propellers were a Cold War state
secret.
The
ship has approximately 600,000 square feet of floor space and was conceived to
provide luxury passenger service to and from Europe and to quickly convert into a superfast military transport, if
necessary. The vast vessel was a powerful expression of American postwar
optimism and ambition.
Faster
passenger jets ushered in an era of air travel and led to the downfall of
ocean-going super-liners. The S.S. United States left service prior to 1970.
Currently, she is docked in Philadelphia, stripped of her innards and rusting
away in the Delaware River.
She is
a powerful expression of American pessimism, retrenchment and
retraction in the Obama Era.
The
hulking S.S. “United States,” once the envy of the world, now literally and figuratively has lost her
bearings- and her guts- and sits idly by, hoping to somehow avoid ending up on
the scrap heap of history.
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