Posted on 03/10/2024 1:52:07 PM PDT by Dr. Franklin
You've probably seen this massive ship here docked at Pier 82 in Philadelphia. It's the SS United States. Once known as the queen of the seas, the vessel's caretakers are sending out an sos as it faces the threat of eviction. There has been an on going dispute between the SS United States conservancy and Penn warehousing about unjust docking fees. The once grand ocean liner is simultaneously knotted in a legal mess. Its fate lies in the hands of a federal judge who could decide the ship must be booted due to hundreds of thousands of dollars in outstanding fees. Such a move based on timing could leave the conservancy that owns the 990-foot boat in need of finding a new home, possibly sinking it for good.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Also, note that the top of the ship is aluminum to cut down on its weight, which added to her speed.
I’d like to see a video walkthrough of this ship in its current condition. Bet it would be spooky.
They can always use it to warehouse actual American citizens who are displaced from their homes to make room for Briben’s newcomers.
I suspect her fate will be that of most ships, the breakers or the bottom.
fully agree with you.
Rainbow warriors wouldn’t dare go on anything called the “SS United States” or its sister ship “SS America.” I’m surprised they haven’t demanded it be recycled in to George Floyd statues.
It IS a shame, but I would suggest that the current state of the cruise industry has pretty much wrecked the possibility of any such concept. Fairly ordinary cruise ships are already very hoity toity inside, fully the equivalent of a high end hotel. And you can get cruises for little more than the ordinary cost of a medium-high end hotel. Cruises are actually pretty darn cheap.
Now I’m not gonna tell you I can say what the ultra-rich would want in such a thing, because I am not one of them. But it ain’t gonna be a big ship with the capacity for 5000 PAX. I could definitely see cruise ships repurposed to eldercare facilities. The ship I worked on, RCCL’s Jewel of the Seas for 10 months as a musician, had a fully equipped infirmary (and a morgue) but you can’t do surgery on a ship that can rock and roll. I would think that very rich people, when they want to go somewhere, they want to go at airplane speed. And when they want something, they want it now. Plus, rich people get bored and once you run out things to do on a cruise, you are nothing but bored. So if it’s not on the ship they have to wait. There ARE people who have booked permanent suites on cruise ships as their eldercare homes. There is one lady on the Queen Mary II who has an endowment of some kind that pays for her perpetual room & board there.
I could also see retired cruise ships working as homeless shelters. At least they could be hosed down when the occupants change.
Very interesting — thanks. It’s too bad they had strip out the interior walls for asbestos removal. It’s mostly just the metal frame now without much of its original character. But, as the project leader for the conservancy says, that makes it kind of a blank canvas, and as such they’re looking for a visionary investor to do a total renovation. She contrasts this with the Queen Mary, another one of the handful of surviving ocean liners of the era, whose original appointments were all intact making a historical restoration the natural approach. It would be great to see them succeed in getting the SS United States reworked in grand fashion and back on the seas again.
Last week i found a 4 hour video tour of this ship from 1991.
Filmed after the auction but before she was gutted.
The interior is still intact.
Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx9nfj_WHRQ
Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tl8OkIY4tU
I have always been a big fan of this liner and found the video pretty fascinating.
Thanks — I’ll check those out.
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