If purchased by a scrapper after forty years of waiting for a reprieve, United States will be towed away from the city of her designer’s birth and dragged by her anchor chains onto a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Here the greatest American ship ever built will be ripped to pieces and melted down to make razor blades and bedsprings.
She would be demolished in the reverse of how she was built. The wreckers will start their cutting away at the aluminum superstructure, sending the radar mast and mighty smokestacks tumbling down. The bow and stern will be next; with a shower of sparks, large sections of the graceful steel hull will fall away from the ship and land with a thud onto the beach. As more of the ship is demolished, she will be hauled higher and higher on land. Finally, the mighty engines and bronze propellers will be harvested from the skeletal remains of the ship, and then hauled away by truck to be melted down. After a year or so, the keel plates, laid down on the Newport News slipway #10 on a blustery February morning back in 1950, will be pulled from the mud and carted away.
During the spring of 2010, United States awaited a decision about her future at Philadelphia’s Pier 82, surrounded by a maze of security cameras and barbed wire. The once-busy Delaware River waterfront scene, where Willy Gibbs watched the St. Louis christened in 1894, is long gone. In place of piers and shipyards are strip malls, big-box stores, parking lots, and highways. Each day thousands speed by United States on Columbus Boulevard, Interstate 95, and the Walt Whitman Bridge, scarcely noticing the faded red, white, and blue funnels that loom over South Philadelphia.
But close up, the great ship’s immense size is still overwhelming. Stripped of fittings, she rides higher in the water than intended. Her once-lustrous exterior paint is cracked and falling in sheets; red antifouling paint above the waterline has faded to a ghoulish gray. The black hull is scarred with rust. Red, white, and blue chips from the two funnels lie scattered like leaves on the pier’s loading dock. The wind pushes the liner back and forth from the pier, causing groans from the ship and shrieks from the lines tying her down.
On board, a visitor walks on broken glass shards scattered on cracked decks. All four propellers lie on the fantail; a nearby section of stern railing is mangled from a mishap during the hoist of the propellers up and over. A few shuffleboard courts survive on the first-class sports deck, their painted white lines barely visible, their surfaces pockmarked. All of the ship’s aluminum lifeboats, which once buffered the sports decks from the wind and spray of the North Atlantic, have long been removed and sold for scrap.
Inside, Dorothy Marckwald’s crisp, classic interiors have been stripped to bare metal. Windows that crewmen once polished to a shine are streaked with grime. There are a few bits and pieces of what once was: a crew bulletin board, a few swivel chairs in a crew lounge, a Ping-Pong table sitting in the chartroom, a stained fragment of a first-class dinner menu wedged in a storage locker. On the bridge, all of the original instrumentation, including the ship’s wheel, navigation equipment, and engine room telegraphs, are gone, leaving raised stubs and severed wiring poking up from the deck. The first-class ballroom—once the epitome of 1950s postwar chic—now sits vacant and silent. Pools of water sit on the stage once graced by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ethel Merman, and Meyer Davis. The circular dance floor remains, its black surface peeling up at the edges. Scrawled notes on metal bulkheads are ghostly reminders of the workers who built the Big Ship more than half a century ago. The floor plan of the famed Duck Suite can still be made out by the partition slots in the decks, as well as holes where plumbing fixtures used to be. A bit of midnight-blue paint still clings to a column in the darkened, musty-smelling cabin-class dining room.
The movie theater, now stripped of its blue plush seats and oyster-white walls, still has the stage where, shortly after the maiden voyage, William Francis Gibbs told the crew: “I have a great affection for this ship. It’s a large object, but I think my affection is coextensive with its size, and likewise I have an affection for every man who has made possible and makes possible day by day, the extraordinary success of this ship so far.”10 Two sets of aluminum double doors, whose handles are still labeled “push” in stylized 1950s lettering, lead from the first-class grand entrance to the enclosed promenade decks. These two boulevards at sea were once lined with deck chairs and uniformed stewards serving tea and hot bouillon. They are now strewn with piles of feathers and bones. A number of pigeons found their way in through the broken windows. Unable to find their way out, they starved to death.
The days of the transatlantic liner as the only way to cross the Atlantic, when “getting there is half the fun,” are long gone. Almost all the great liners are either lying on the bottom of the ocean or have been melted down for scrap metal.
Yet the passenger ship itself is far from dead. Today’s cruise ships, which are so much bigger and more luxurious than Gibbs’s masterpiece, do not have that same sense of speed or purpose. They are designed not for cold weather crossings, but for balmy vacation cruises. Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 and Queen Victoria share the oceans with ships named Carnival Miracle, Fantasia, and Oasis of the Seas. Ships intended for port-hopping holiday excursions don’t need speed; they are built to maximize entertainment features and ocean-view balconies. Most look like condominium blocks, bloated and top-heavy. In rough weather, stabilizer fins jut out to eliminate rolling almost completely. Gone is the steady thump of the engines pulsating through the ship; propulsion units are now placed outside of the hull in pods, and insulation almost completely muffles vibration. In addition, standardization and prefabrication in design and construction has resulted in most of these ships looking alike. The visual distinction that made the profiles of transatlantic liners of the past instantly recognizable to seafarers and schoolchildren alike is gone.
United States would seem to have little in common with her successors, and yet the great ship left its lasting mark even here. Her construction techniques and standards continue to be the benchmark for ship design. She was the first big liner built and floated out of a dry dock, which is now the norm for new ship construction, not sent sliding down the ways. Her use of prefabricated components, manufactured off-site—a technique that Gibbs pioneered with the Liberty ship and used on United States—is now universal. And United States’ innovative use of aluminum construction is the method that makes possible the high, balconied superstructures of modern cruise ships.
Unfortunately, cruise ship passenger safety standards fall short of those used on United States. The cruise ship is not required to follow stringent Navy fire codes. A number of recent fires on board proved William Francis Gibbs’s wisdom in using nonflammable construction materials and furnishings in vulnerable passenger areas. In the other important area of ship safety—protection from sinking in the event of a collision—the new 2010 Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) standards are tighter than ever, but still short of those set by Gibbs on United States. SOLAS requires every new ship built today to be able to remain afloat with as many as three compartments flooded; United States was designed to remain afloat with as many as five breached. In fact, the ship’s seventeen-year career was both accident- and fire-free.