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SS United States

The SS United States is currently moored in Philadelphia.

The only entry to the SS United States is via a gangplank that gives access to the lower decks.

The remains of the grand staircase on the SS United States

The engine rooms of the SS United States were in remarkable shape, although the entire area was pitch black.

A Canada Goose's nest inside the doorway of the SS United States

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What This Drone Footage Captured At This Abandoned Philadelphia Ship Is Truly Grim

Kim Magaraci

Kim Magaraci graduated Rutgers University with a degree in Geography and has spent the last seven years as a freelance travel writer. Contact: [email protected]

More by this Author

If you’ve driven through south Philly, chances are you’ve noticed the gigantic ocean liner right sitting in the Delaware River between factories and warehouses. What’s the deal with this giant, abandoned, rusting steam ship? Well, she’s the S.S. United States, and she’s one of the most famous steamships in the world. Her story is fascinating – as is the footage that people have been able to capture of this incredibly unique landmark in Philadelphia.

You can see the fastest ocean liner ever built in person at Pier 82. ( Click here for directions ). This ship is just one of the incredible pieces of history that belongs in Philadelphia – and it’s no wonder she’s here! After all, our city is known for holding records and being the first to do things – in fact, did you know That Philadelphia Was The First To Do These 11 Things ? Learn more about your Philly history by reading on!

OnlyInYourState may earn compensation through affiliate links in this article. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

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SS United States

Top ways to experience SS United States and nearby attractions

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SS United States - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

• (1.48 mi) Live Casino & Hotel Philadelphia
• (2.75 mi) The Dwight D Hotel
• (2.33 mi) Independence Park Hotel, BW Premier Collection
• (2.97 mi) AKA Rittenhouse Square
• (2.22 mi) Thomas Bond House Bed & Breakfast
• (0.20 mi) IKEA Restaurant
• (0.23 mi) Chick-fil-A
• (0.54 mi) John's Roast Pork
• (0.58 mi) The Original Tony Lukes
• (0.28 mi) Wendy's

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A new dawn may be coming to the SS United States , the fastest ocean liner ever, which has been tied up at a pier in Philadelphia since 1996. The ship is 990 feet long, more than a hundred feet longer than the Titanic.

The World’s Fastest Ocean Liner May Be Restored to Sail Again

Tied to a pier in Philadelphia for 20 years, the rusted, stripped, but still majestic S.S. United States could return to service as a luxury cruise ship.

In July 1952, on its maiden voyage, the S.S. United States shattered the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by a passenger ship, steaming from New York to Le Havre in less than four days. In 1969, when it went into dry dock in Newport News, Virginia, and its crew members left their belongings in their cabins, not knowing they’d never sail on it again, it still held the record. And it still does today—though it’s been retired for nearly 47 years, and motionless at a pier in Philadelphia for nearly 20.

On the enclosed promenade deck, first-class passengers once strolled and lounged in deck chairs. First class was at the center of the ship, where the motion was gentlest; cabin class was at the stern and tourist class at the bow.

“The ship is a little worse for wear,” Susan Gibbs said not long ago as we toured the rusting hulk. She is the granddaughter of the ship’s designer, William Francis Gibbs. “But it’s important to keep in mind that she was so overbuilt, she’s still structurally sound. The bones are solid. So it’s not a pipe dream to imagine she could be resurrected.”

On February 4, Crystal Cruises announced that it had signed an option to purchase the ship from the S.S. United States Conservancy , the nonprofit that Gibbs directs. Crystal—a subsidiary of a cruise-and-resort company called Genting Hong Kong —plans to spend this year studying the feasibility of restoring the United States as a luxury cruise vessel, which could cost as much as $700 million. In the meantime it will pay the $60,000 or so a month it costs to maintain the ship.

In the first-class dining room you can still see the stanchions that fixed the tables to the floors. On the back wall there was a sculpture of nymph-like figures representing the Four Freedoms.

Last fall those monthly costs were threatening to doom the great ship to a sad fate: hauled out by its anchor chains onto some Texas beach and scrapped. “I thought she was going down,” said Gibbs. But the Conservancy launched a last-ditch appeal that brought new interest and enough cash from the ship’s many fans to allow it to hang on a few more months. Against all odds, it now has a chance to return to sea. The ship’s age will make that a challenge; all sorts of standards have changed.

Among the Conservancy’s FAQ on the ship, I found this entry: “How do I research whether one of my ancestors traveled on the S.S. United States ?” Since I myself crossed the Atlantic three times on the ship, that shivered my timbers a bit.

Paint is peeling in great shards all over the ship, but at the stern, the railing is also bashed in. An accident happened when a crane was removing one of the propellers some years back.

If the United States were a building, it would be a National Historical Landmark. If it were an airplane, it would be in the Smithsonian. Because it’s an ocean liner—and surely one of the most beautiful, with its gracile lines and stacks swept back as if by the wind—it’s tied up at a pier on the Delaware River, between freighters offloading fruit and cocoa. When you stand on its bow today, you gaze not at foaming Atlantic breakers but across Christopher Columbus Boulevard at a Longhorn Steakhouse and a Lowe’s home improvement store.

“Why does this nation forget its historical accomplishments?” Gibbs mused as we took refuge in the Longhorn restaurant from a blustery January day. “Why is this ship languishing in obscurity?”

In the first-class ballroom, imagine cocktail tables and red barrel chairs surrounding the linoleum dance floor, which is still there. The bar isn’t original; it was brought in a few years ago for a movie shoot.

Through the venetian blinds we could see its blade-like bow, ready to slice across traffic into our booth. The shape of the hull below the water line was one of the secrets of the ship’s tremendous speed—and it was a military secret, as the United States was designed to be converted into a troopship in time of war (though it never was).

Classified too, until the 1970s, were the ship’s four, 18-foot bronze propellers. They were designed by an engineer named Elaine Kaplan. According to A Man and His Ship , a biography by Steven Ujifusa , William Francis Gibbs couldn’t quite comprehend that an attractive woman could be an excellent engineer—but he prized excellence above all else, and so he lived with that paradox.

Looking straight at the bow highlights the ship’s slender lines, which were made possible in part by the light-weight aluminum superstructure.

Gibbs himself, though he designed one of the greatest ships of the 20th century, as well as 2,700 Liberty ships during World War II, had no formal training in his craft. After getting a law degree from Columbia University, he’d lasted only a year as a lawyer. But he’d been drawing ships since 1894 when, as an eight-year-old boy, he’d watched the launch of a 550-foot steamship, the S.S. St. Louis, in the Delaware River, a few miles upriver from where the United States now floats.

In 1913, in his father’s attic, he began drawing what nearly four decades later would become the United States —a 990-foot ship intended, Ujifusa writes, “to be the fastest and best ever built, intended to surpass the ill-fated Titanic in every respect.” It was the year after the iceberg incident.

This way to tourist class (just kidding). A service ladder descends into the bowels of the ship near the stern.

Decades later, when Gibbs finally got the chance to design his ship in reality, he divided it into 20 watertight-compartments so a mere iceberg couldn’t sink it. He made it close to fireproof—he’d watched the Normandie burn and capsize at the pier in Manhattan—in part by using no wood on board except in the Steinway grand pianos. And he made it lightweight by building almost the entire superstructure of aluminum, giving it a power-to-weight ratio the seas had never seen.

In sea trials the United States broke 38 knots. On its record-setting maiden voyage, operating at two-thirds of full steam, it averaged more than 35 knots, four knots faster than the Queen Mary ’s record. As it was breaking the speed record, passengers were dancing conga lines down the promenade deck.

The swimming pool had large gutters to catch sloshing water as the ship rolled. First and cabin classes had access at different times; tourist class was out of luck.

Into the Depths

From that enclosed, sun-striped gallery, 400 feet long on each side of the ship, Susan Gibbs and I penetrated with flashlights into the engine room, to the edge of the swimming pool—back in its water-filled days you would slosh back and forth as the ship rolled—and even into the morgue, where the occasional unfortunate traveler was chilled until landfall.

All the furnishings, from the ship’s wheel to the silverware, were ripped out and auctioned off in the 1980s by a real estate developer. The next owner had the ship towed to Ukraine to rip out the interior walls: They were filled with that miraculous fire-retardant, asbestos. Today only the outlines of the cabins remain on bare floors; the toilet holes are the most recognizable feature. I was unable to locate the cabin where I had discovered seasickness.

On the United States, eight boilers made steam to drive four turbines that could generate more than 240,000 horsepower. It shattered the transatlantic speed record without ever running at full steam.

After the maiden voyage, William Francis Gibbs never sailed on his masterpiece again—and yet “he was obsessively devoted to the ship,” said Susan Gibbs. When the United States was at sea he would call on the ship-to-shore radio every day for a status report. Every two weeks when she returned to New York, he would rise at dawn and have his chauffeur drive him out to Brooklyn so he could watch her steam through the Narrows—then race over to Pier 82 on the west side of Manhattan to be there when she docked. His wife Vera claimed he took pictures of the ship to bed. Vera had a separate bedroom.

In its storage room below deck the chain of one of the ship’s anchors disappears into the shaft that leads to the sea.

Susan Gibbs never sailed on the United States . Her grandfather died when she was five and she barely knew him, or of him. Her own father, Frank Gibbs, never spoke of the great man.

When Frank died, she went through his belongings hoping to learn more about him. But she mostly found memorabilia about her grandfather. There were profiles in Fortune and The New Yorker. There was his portrait on the cover of Time, which dubbed him a “technological revolutionist.” Something clicked; a diluted version of the obsession that had animated that strange aloof man passed to his granddaughter. She went to Philadelphia to meet the ship.

Tourist class had its own theater toward the bow, flanked on either side by the first-class observation lounge—which you can now see into because the asbestos-laden walls have been removed. The three passenger classes were rigorously separated.

Gibbs anthropomorphizes the vessel now, she said—sees her as a woman, strong, tough, enduring, but in serious need of a little sisterly aid. The Queen Mary has become a hotel in Long Beach, California, the Rotterdam a hotel and museum in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. For a long time something of the kind was Gibbs’s dream for the United States . A return to sea seemed too much to hope for. And it’s far from a done deal.

The past few winters have gotten under the ship’s skin; the red-white-and-black paint is coming off in enormous flakes. “Every year I come, the funnels are a little lighter, there’s a little more wear and tear,” Gibbs said. “In 2016, it’s going to be a make or break year.”

The ship was divided into 20 compartments that extended 40 feet above the water-line and was designed to remain afloat if as many as five of them were flooded. Water-tight doors separated the compartments.

Mind Your Wake

“When individual memory fails, we need reminders to help maintain our connections with the past,” the author David Macaulay has written on the web site of the Conservancy . Macaulay emigrated to America from Britain on the United States as a boy in 1957. It was the year before the first passenger jet crossed the Atlantic, sounding the death knell for ocean liners. My own first voyage on the ship was in 1964, and since then some member of my family—a sibling, a parent, a child—has always been on the opposite side of the Atlantic. That’s made me a big fan of jets.

But not of the experience of jet travel—of being sealed in a can in one world and poured out into another hours later. On the United States, during the days in between, you felt space passing as you stepped onto the deck and the wind caught your body like a sail; felt it as you watched the foam part at the bow and rush along the sides. You watched the broad roiling wake disappear to the horizon, and it was as if the medium of life had been rendered visible, as if time had become a tangible ether. I admit I wasn’t actually thinking that when I was seven or nine or even 12.

“The last winter really beat it up,” says Ray Griffiths, a caretaker of the ship. In winter, water seeping under the peeling paint freezes and expands, accelerating the peeling.

Still, it’s one of my older brother’s first memories, from one of the first crossings of the United States , in 1952 (at least he thinks it was the United States) . He’s four years old and standing on the fantail with our father and our sister, then two. Each kid is holding onto Dad with one hand and has a balloon in the other. My brother lets his go and watches it veer and bank like a swallow into the distance, skipping off the winds, and what amazes him is how long he can watch it fly.

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Help Save America’s Flagship

the SS United States

The pride of a nation. The pinnacle of technological and artistic achievement. A monument to the American can-do spirit… The SS  United States  represents our common values, our strengths, and the epic scope and scale of our ambition. Her story is our story, and today, America’s Flagship needs our help. Join us as we unite to save and restore this irreplaceable icon to the glory and dignity she deserves. 

Redevelopment Progress

NEW: Full design and redevelopment program for the SS United States unveiled. View new images and learn more by clicking below.

Digital Exhibitions

Discover the SS United States’ broader connections to American life through our digital exhibitions, “Advertising the United States ” and “ Transatlantic Trailblazers.” .

What have the steamships of the Holland-America Line, the Hague furniture factory H.P. Mutters & Son and entrepreneur Casper van Hooren have anything to do with each other? A story that reads like an adventure novel.

NEWSMAX TV's "America Right Now" recently came aboard America's Flagship to learn her story and hear more about the urgent need for the nation's political leaders to help save the United States .

The SS United States has been docked at Pier 82 in South Philadelphia for over two decades, but it faces eviction amid a legal battle with a landlord over back rent.

The fastest ocean liner to ever cross the Atlantic — in both directions — has been languishing at a pier in south Philadelphia for more than twenty-five years. However, the days of the rusting SS United States calling at Pier 82 in the City of Brotherly Love are likely numbered. The 990 ft. ship that's bigger than the Titanic is facing eviction.

SS United States Conservancy board member Warren Jones tells ‘Fox & Friends Weekend’ that the ship 'needs to be saved’ after rent was doubled without warning during the pandemic.

The conservancy’s attorney, however, contends that the increased rent was never properly negotiated with them and was instead raised unilaterally. Should the ship be evicted, the Conservancy will need to find a new berth or potentially scrap the vessel.

“If this ship is evicted, it would have to be scrapped or reefed,” said Conservancy board member Warren Jones. “There is no alternative – given the size of the ship.”

"We're in a race against time," said Susan Gibbs, the conservancy's president and granddaughter of the ship's designer. "We're hopeful. But the clock is ticking."

The caretakers of the SS United States, once known as the Queen of the Seas, have sent out an SOS to the highest office in the land as the vessel faces the threat of eviction.

The caretakers of the SS United States, once known as the Queen of the Seas, have sent out an SOS to the highest office in the land as the vessel faces the threat of eviction. In addition to President Joe Biden, the SS United States Conservancy has sent a plea for help to the U.S. Secretary of the Navy and members of Congress, describing how the ship is “under the imminent threat of eviction and destruction,” appealing to their patriotis

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Thank you for your interest in America’s Flagship, the SS United States !

Saving and Restoring the SS United States

ABOARD SS UNITED STATES - The world's fastest ocean liner, which hasn't sailed in more than four decades, has received what may be a permanent stay of execution, literally hours before its luck seemed to have run out. The ship, which sits at a Philadelphia mooring, had its maiden voyage in 1952, setting a still-unbroken record for an Atlantic crossing (less than four days, at a top speed of 44 knots, faster even than today's most modern aircraft carriers). Despite the vessel's speed and elegance—it was a top choice for politicians, dignitaries and Hollywood personalities making ocean traverses—its functional life ended in 1969, as the era of the great liners drew to a close. Taken out of service, the ship began an odyssey that would see it towed from port to port and its once-luxurious interior gutted. In 2003, the ship, sitting nearly unnoticed at a slip on the Delaware River, was purchased by Norwegian Cruise Lines.

In June, Hong Kong Gentine, NCL's parent company, was reportedly on the verge of accepting a $5.9 million offer from a scrapper. With hours remaining, Philadelphia philanthropist H.F. Gerry Lenfest agreed to donate $3 million, according to Dan McSweeney, executive director of the conservancy. Though the resulting bid was considerably less than competing offers, the cruise company—which McSweeney says was "mindful of the ship's importance"—accepted.

But the battle isn't over. During the next 20 months, the conservancy needs to attract a developer who will underwrite the massive restoration the nearly six-decade-old ship will require in order to become a viable, self-sustaining attraction. The ship's interior is almost fully gutted—it is fundamentally an empty shell—which gives restorers an opportunity to work from a blank slate, but the challenge is to start from scratch. The conservancy foresees the vessel's 550,000 square feet recast as a shopping, hotel, entertainment and museum destination. McSweeney declined to speculate on the cost of the full restoration, but the SS Rotterdam, another of the legendary liners of the 1960s, opened in February as a floating museum and hotel after a 10-year restoration that cost a reported $327 million. The next step will be a full environmental assessment to determine how any toxic materials still aboard the United States will be removed.

The challenges shouldn't diminish the enormity of the conservancy's achievement. This July 1, McSweeney boarded the SS United States for the first time since this new lease on life was announced. The liner's visual trademark—a pair of faded red funnels, along with its still intact bridge and radar mast—was lit in celebration. "We've been given the opportunity to fulfill the ship's promise," McSweeney says, as well as the conservancy's promise to the ship. "That story begins now."

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'America's flagship' under threat of eviction in Philly. But its owners have big plans

• The historic SS United States is the largest passenger ship built in America, still holder of the transatlantic speed record
• Moored in Philly since 1996, its landlords have filed suit to evict the ship
• The SS United states Conservancy is fighting the suit, and has big plans to turn the ship into a floating hotel and museum

Even a 53,000-ton symbol of American excellence is not immune to a housing crisis.

The SS United States, known variously as “America’s flagship” and “speed queen of the seas,” could be forced from its Delaware River berth in Philadelphia by an eviction lawsuit perhaps unique in the country.   

Though now immobile, the nearly thousand-foot-long ship remains the largest and fastest transatlantic passenger liner ever built in America. An icon of the golden days of oceanic luxury, it was also a marvel of engineering that hosted four U.S. presidents and celebrities from Marilyn Monroe to Walt Disney.

For the 27 years since the ship has been moored at Pier 82 on the Delaware River, the SS United States’ funnels have presided 175 feet high over the low-slung skyline of South Philly, an unlikely source of wonderment to shoppers in the parking lot of a nearby Ikea.  

But during the pandemic in 2021, the vessel’s landlords hiked the rent by double. Now, according to federal legal filings, pier operators would like the ship gone. The suit for ejection was filed a few months before the Port of Philadelphia announced bold renovation plans .

Lawyers for operators  Penn Warehousing & Distribution  say in legal documents that the historic ship’s owners are scofflaws who’ve refused to pay the new rent — and caused damage to the pier. Penn's lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.  

The nonprofit  SS United States Conservancy , the ship’s owners, denies these claims. They argue in court filings that they’re model tenants who’d dutifully paid the same $850 a day they'd agreed upon more than a decade ago — and that their lease with Penn Warehousing had no provisions for sudden and unilateral rent hikes. 

Either way, the ship’s future is now in question. 

The SS United States is a monument to American exceptionalism

The SS United States is a vital piece of our history, said Conservancy president Susan Gibbs — one that must be preserved as a testament to American unity and ingenuity.

“There is no other American ocean liner left,” Gibbs said, while standing atop the ship’s highest deck in May. “She was the greatest ship in her day, and she remains so now. And it's just so important to preserve our history as a nation.”

More photos: Peek inside the SS United States, the last of the great ocean liners

Back in 2015: SS United States, once fastest liner afloat, faces scrapper's torch

The SS United States is the biggest passenger ship built entirely in this country. The two-way transatlantic speed record it set on its 1952 maiden voyage remains unrivaled by any ship anywhere.

“The ship smashed the transatlantic speed record using only two-thirds of her power,” Gibbs crowed. The ship has still never been brought to its theoretical full speed of 42 knots.

The SS United States ferried immigrants to new homes in America after the World War and was fully racially integrated starting from its first voyage. The ship also played host to royalty, not just England's Duke of Windsor but also Duke Ellington of the United States. The future Jackie Kennedy plied her early journalism career aboard its decks, capturing the shipboard habits of aristocratic dogs. In sumptuous dining rooms, chef Otto Bismarck served specialties from poularde de Bresse to kangaroo tail soup.

If laid on its side, the 990-foot ship would be taller than any building in New Jersey or Delaware, and would also be the second tallest in Philadelphia — bested only by a recent Comcast tower that looks a little like a cigarette being pulled out of its pack.

Despite its literally Titanic size, the SS United States could outrun a torpedo in its day, said the ship’s caretaker, Ray Griffiths, a feat that made the ship as attractive to diplomats as it was to stars like Gary Cooper or Liz Taylor. 

Indeed, aspects of the ship’s design remained state secrets during its early years. Its designer, William Francis Gibbs, was a legendary designer of Navy ships. The United States was built as a military-private partnership, which allowed it to transform into a military asset transporting 14,000 troops if the Cold War ever went hot.

“She's overbuilt. She's built like a Navy ship would have been from that era,” Griffiths said. “Mr. Gibbs combined almost all of his favorite types of designs and put it in the ship. He tried to iron out every potential weakness that he could come up with. And he did a terrific job. Everybody knows about the Titanic, right? It sank. That's why it's so famous. This ship did not.”

The lawsuit that threatens the SS United States' berth in Philadelphia

The unsinkable SS United States’ current troubles began on Aug. 10, 2021, when a controller at Penn Warehousing sent a terse letter to the Conservancy, saying the ship had been in place for too long without a rent increase.

Henceforth, as of two weeks from that moment, the rent would double to $1,700 a day, said the letter, double the rate previously outlined in the lease. 

The Conservancy instead continued to pay the previously agreed-upon rate of $850 a day, pending negotiations. According to the lease document presented to the court, their rent was due at that rate “until the vessel is removed from its current location.”

In March of the next year, Penn Warehousing filed a removal notice and then a lawsuit, citing back rent of more than $160,000. They asked the courts to eject the ship from Pier 82.

The Conservancy’s lawyers countered that the port operator had no provisions in the lease that allowed them to unilaterally raise rent — certainly not with two weeks' notice during a pandemic — and that Penn Warehousing had taken this action to force the long-mothballed ship into financial duress, and out of the port. 

The facts of the rent dispute are not substantively in question: Lawyers for each side attached largely the same documents as evidence. 

After the case for ejection in Pennsylvania was tossed on technical grounds, Penn Warehousing took it to federal court, where it now sits after multiple mitigation attempts failed. The trial is scheduled to go in front of a jury as soon as Sept. 18 of this year.

A troubled 50-year-history for the SS United States

This lawsuit is hardly the first existential threat faced by the SS United States in the last half-century. 

America’s onetime flagship was put out of service in 1969, victim mostly to the rise of commercial airplanes. It now floats forlornly behind a security checkpoint in a working pier off South Philly’s Columbus Boulevard, a stately and unlikely presence looming over the drive-thru lines of a nearby Chick-fil-A.

The vessel passed like a cursed monkey’s paw from owner to owner in the decades since it went out of service. Each new possessor had visionary plans for the famed vessel. It would be, perhaps, a time-share cruise ship. A Hawaiian passenger liner. A floating hotel. A casino, an offshore entertainment complex or a hospital ship. 

Each plan was scuttled. Time and again, the SS United States barely escaped the scrapyard.

In 1984, a debt-riddled Seattle developer stripped the ship hollow and auctioned “everything that was freestanding or could be unbolted from her interiors,” according to an article that year in the New York Times. 

Peeling primer now hangs like stalactites from much of its interior. Rust mottles its outer hull, whose lower half shimmers with rainbow reflections when the light hits it just so. The ship’s famous red, white and blue funnels stand denuded.

The ship’s magisterial grand ballroom, its original dancefloor still intact, stands empty except for a bar constructed for a Colin Farrell action movie, "Dead Man Down," shot there in 2012.

All that remains of the ship’s first-class cabins are skeletal outlines on the floor. The vessel’s second-class bar is now in use only for fundraisers — a few beer bottles leftover from one such event stood scattered across a bartop on our May visit — or maybe the occasional shift drink by the skeleton crew who still keeps the United States in shape.

But whatever the ship’s cosmetic condition, said caretaker Griffiths, its “bones” are still good. The metal remains largely uncorroded. Even after being stripped, the ship is watertight after some careful maintenance. 

Griffiths pats the ship with evident pride.

Former passenger Andrew Staroscik remembers playing pingpong there, as a 7-year-old Polish child whose family escaped the German invasion in World War II. His first awestruck vision of America was of the men who hosed down the ship in New York Harbor.

"I remember arriving in New York City and the fire hoses shooting water," said Staroscik, now retired from a career at Bell Labs. "It was like you see in movies."

This May, he was thrilled to find that pingpong table still there, though covered in dust and missing its net, along cavernous sun-filled walkways where he remembers sprinting back and forth en route to his new country.

"Shame it's in such a state," Staroscik said, gesturing to the ship that to him once seemed impossibly large.

In 1992, after auctioning the SS United States' fixtures, that Seattle developer eventually had to surrender the vessel to U.S. Marshals. 

The SS United States was towed by new owners to Turkey, and then to Ukraine where she was stripped of asbestos — before finally being left out in South Philly to rust like some character in a Springsteen song.

How the ship was acquired by the nonprofit SS United States Conservancy for preservation

South Philly is where Susan Gibbs first found her. 

Her grandfather William Francis Gibbs, a product of Harvard but a native of Philadelphia, had dreamed since his youth of designing the world’s fastest ship.

He pledged himself to the sea while still a boy, upon seeing the launch of a large ship in South Philly. 

“It was actually a lifelong obsession,” his granddaughter said. “He developed the first designs for a 1,000-foot-long, fast ocean liner back in 1914 or 1915. He dedicated his life to bringing this extraordinary ship into the world.”

In 1952 the SS United States became that masterpiece, the ship he’d dreamed of — a large passenger liner built with lightweight materials and designed to rigid military specifications, built to be both unburnable and unsinkable, with no wood on the ship that wasn't a kitchen butcher block or a piano. 

“She's America's flagship,” Susan Gibbs said. “And she just personified the nation's competence and technological know-how and ambition after World War II.”

Her grandfather remained close to the ship, she said, calling the engineer and commodore each day while the ship was at sea, and greeting it in New York when it came back home.

After she discovered a trove of old documents upon the death of her father in 1995, the SS United States became Susan Gibbs’s obsession as well. 

The Conservancy she heads is a consortium of “maritime enthusiasts and historic preservationists” with donors from all 50 states and 40 countries, Gibbs said. A precursor group, in 1999, got the ship placed in the National Register of Historic Places, one of the youngest landmarks in the registry.

The Conservancy also made a believer out of billionaire Philadelphia philanthropist H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, who ponied up $5.8 million in 2011 to help the nonprofit procure and preserve the historic vessel.

The SS United States' current stewards, like its past ones, have bold plans for the ship.

In 2018, they engaged developer RXR Realty and a host of naval designers, with plans to turn the ship’s more than 500,000 usable square feet into a floating hotel complex. Potential final destinations have included sites in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

“The vision is a hotel, an event space — with really amazing food and beverage opportunities, as the developers like to call it,” Gibbs said. “Like a 'Mad Men'-style lounge. As well as, of course, a Museum and Innovation Center.”

Though delayed by the pandemic, these ambitious development plans are now again making “significant progress,” Gibbs said. 

What they need is a little more time.

Development plans for SS United States moving forward, amid obstacles

Time is expensive for a ship like the SS United States. And it is not limitless. With each day, the amount Penn Warehousing says the ship owes grows larger. 

And the lawsuit might not be the only concern.

In July 2022, four months after Penn Warehousing's suit to eject the ship, the Port of Philadelphia unveiled a three-minute video outlining a bold new vision for the future, meant to revitalize the marine terminal on the Delaware River.

At Pier 82, where the SS United States sits, the agency’s video showed a bustling “Forest Products Center.” 

A computer depiction of the SS United States, moored to its pier, disappeared in the agency’s vision of the future. As triumphant music played, the ship was boarded over by a broad and blank dock, upon which moved a fleet of lumber trucks that seemed made from Legos.

Whatever the results of the lawsuit, Gibbs knows the historic ocean liner has no permanent future at a South Philly pier walled off by security gates and closed to visitors. 

Its current berth at Pier 82 was always meant to be temporary, Gibbs said. 

The question is whether they can find a new home in time — and whether they’ll get the chance to do so on their own timetable.

The SS United States may be the fastest transatlantic ship ever built. But it is now unable to move under its own steam. Indeed, three of its large propellers are displayed at museums around the country. 

Moving the ship even temporarily from its current berth would be not just time-consuming, but extremely costly. In 2015, facing insufficient funds, the Conservancy warned it might be forced to scrap the ship they’d charged themselves with preserving. That time, the donations came through.

“From the beginning, we have seen three possible paths for the vessel," Gibbs said, standing outside the ship she treasures, “redevelopment as a stationary attraction, converting the ship into an artificial underwater reef or scrapping the vessel.”

She's confident there’s a path forward that doesn’t involve the grimmer two options, she said.  

Gibbs points to the RMS Queen Mary, a British ocean liner with an equally troubled financial past, which just reopened to the public as a hotel and museum in California this spring. To the Queen Elizabeth 2, now a floating hotel in Dubai.

The SS United States can be “even better,” Gibbs said. With fixtures stripped, the ship has more possibilities for innovative design.

Representatives from RXR Realty declined to comment on the current state of development plans. But Gibbs believes the Conservancy can still save a ship she sometimes wishes she didn’t fall in love with so deeply — a vessel she sees not just as the work of her grandfather, but as a vision of America at its best. 

A ship whose parts were built by people in all of the lower 48 states. An America not divided against itself. A country that worked together to accomplish something great.

She paused, suddenly, noting the reflections bouncing off the waves of the Delaware River and onto the sides of the ship: countless points of rainbowed light, dancing across the hull of the SS United States to music it seemed almost possible to hear.

“Look at it shimmer,” she said, smiling. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based reporter for USA TODAY Network. Write him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @matthewkorfhage .

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A virtual port of call for all those who love the sea , hosted by nautical novelist rick spilman.

SS United States – Exploration of the Abandoned Ocean Liner

Nevertheless, from the start, her days in liner service were numbered. Only five years after entering service, Boeing introduced the Model 707 , the first widely adopted long-range commercial jetliner. The 707 ushered in the Jet Age and marked the end of the Golden age of ocean liners .

United States maintained an uninterrupted schedule of transatlantic passenger service until 1969 when she was laid up. The ship was sold several times since the 1970s, with each new owner trying unsuccessfully to make the liner profitable. Eventually, the ship’s fittings were sold at auction, and hazardous wastes, including asbestos panels throughout the ship, were removed, leaving her almost completely stripped by 1994. Two years later, she was towed to Pier 82 on the Delaware River, in Philadelphia, where she remains today.

Since 2009, a preservation group called the SS United States Conservancy has been raising funds to save the ship. In December of 2019, the group entered into an agreement with a prominent commercial real estate development firm, RXR Realty, which has been exploring options for the SS United States ’ revitalization.

Here is a short video tour of the SS United States.

S.S. United States – Abandoned Ocean Liner Exploration

SS United States – Exploration of the Abandoned Ocean Liner — 2 Comments

She was a symbol of another era that was also mine. As she stands, she still is a symbol of the new era. Rust. Decay. Acute nostalgia…

I wish the SS United States Conservancy had the money to completely restore her to her former glory, including the original furnishings (even though her furnishing were sold years ago) and bring her back into transatlantic passenger service or into a floating hotel for the east coast, like the Hotel Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.

http://www.ssusc.org

The hulking old ocean liner down by Ikea has a new side gig in a haunting music video

The SS United States' barren passageways have given local director Evan Chapman's Liminal Highway music film a post-apocalyptic vibe. Flutist Tim Munro plays the haunting piece.

The ocean liner the SS United States, docked across from the South Philly Ikea for nearly 25 years, has come close to being repurposed as a casino, a restaurant, and more. In the great ship’s latest side gig, its interior is starring as the backdrop to a haunting music video on YouTube.

In Liminal Highway , flutist Tim Munro is seen in various parts of the ship — from the ballroom and various passageways to the small theater — playing electronically altered flute music that captures the netherworld between sleeping and waking, written in 2015 by Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Cerrone.

The 990-foot-long passenger liner has long been stripped of its once-ornate decor, and film director Evan Chapman of the Philadelphia-based Four/Ten Media has used its barren spaces to give Liminal Highway a postapocalyptic look that prompts memories of the Titanic’s submerged wreckage.

“The idea to shoot [the music] in a massive and empty indoor space came first … and the ship fit perfectly into that,” said Chapman. “The music is also introspective and dramatic, so it felt more fitting to place Tim in the dark depths of the bowels of the ship.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much a sense of being alone in the world in this cavernous forgotten space that would’ve been full of laughter and drinking and carousing,” said flutist Munro in a postproduction interview. “And there I am, alone onstage, looking out on a space with nobody there.”

The ship’s weather-beaten exterior masks a perfectly sound interior, which had all the necessary power sources for Chapman’s film shoot last October. It had previously hosted two documentaries and the 2013 box-office flop Dead Man Down starring Colin Farrell.

Liminal Highway was released Aug. 21 under the auspices of the Miller Theater, Columbia University’s new-music venue. It also has an accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary about the shoot aboard the SS United States. The audio has been released on New Focus Recordings .

The now-retired, early-1950s ocean liner once set trans-Atlantic speed records. Its passengers included Marlon Brando, Coco Chanel, Sean Connery, Gary Cooper, Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, Duke Ellington, Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe, Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne , and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Taken out of service in 1969, it’s now on the National Register of Historic Places. The SS United States has been an incongruous presence on the Philadelphia landscape since 1996, awaiting numerous rehabilitation plans with funds from the likes of H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest and Bill Clinton while gathering rust at Pier 82 along Columbus Boulevard.

The current plan by the tenacious nonprofit SS United States Conservancy is to turn the once-majestic ocean liner into a living museum and mixed-use development in a yet-to-be-determined waterfront city. The conservancy owns the ship and pays its estimated $60,000 per month maintenance and docking fee.

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Congressman Bob Brady needed to vote soon, but he hung back in his Washington, D.C. office for a few minutes longer to talk on the phone because the subject is South Philly — specifically the hulking monster of a ship planted in the Delaware River across from IKEA and Longhorn Steakhouse.

“What the hell’s going on with that thing?” Brady asked.

It’s the perfect question: What the hell is going on with the SS United States?

If you don’t know the SS United States by name, you know it by sight. The ship is so tall it has its own skyline. The ship is so dilapidated it has its own overused, albeit cool, word to describe the situation. The ship is mothballing . Or the ship is mothballed . 

Media have been all over the SS United States for years ( us included ). The Washington Post gave the ship #longform attention in 2014 . The New York Times has written about it four times in the last three years. These articles and the dozens to hundreds of others generally bring up the ship’s plight and allude to some grand future, where the ship becomes an entertainment center, likely in New York, relieving Philly of its “giant ocean liner rusting in a harbor near a bunch of strip clubs” duties.

But will that ever happen? The SS United States was originally supposed to be in Philadelphia for 21 days, according to media reports from 1996. Days . We are now in the 21st year it has been docked on the Delaware, and there’s seemingly no end in sight. Probably because there is no end in sight, according to developers who can’t imagine any use that would bring a return on investment for something so large, so old and so expensive.  

“I’m a progressive developer,” said Alon Barzilay, who converts old buildings into new uses, “but I like to say I’m not a pioneer.”

$15 million just to stay afloat

In a very 1950s way, far from Philadelphia, the SS United States used to be amazing. The luxury passenger liner set a trans-Atlantic speed record that still stands, and it completed the feat in frigid, choppy waters. Among its passengers were Marilyn Monroe and JFK (maybe at the same time?), Judy Garland, Salvador Dalí, Grace Kelly and a young Bill Clinton, who took the SS United States when he crossed the Atlantic for his Rhodes Scholarship in 1968.

Yes, it all sounds very cool — but not as cool as traveling from the United States to Europe in the sky.  By 1969, nobody needed ships because of airplanes, and the SS United States went out of commission. Most everything worth saving from the ship was auctioned off by the 1980s. In the ‘90s, it stayed in Ukraine and Turkey for a while to have asbestos removed and by 1996, perhaps for the first time but certainly not the last, the SS United States was headed for the scrap heap.

South Jersey millionaire Edward Cantor swooped in to buy a controlling interest from a Turkish company. He died several years ago but in his life was known for his adventurous ways. He owned, for instance, a 192-foot yacht called “The Other Woman ” stocked with art by Matisse and Picasso (“It’s treated like another woman — all the attention and the money”). 

One source told Billy Penn  Cantor essentially won the rights to purchase the SS United States in a card game. His idea was to take the ship back to Philadelphia. He expected the city to help with funding for a redevelopment project turning it into a cruise liner or floating hotel — sigh, yes, they were calling it a “floatel” — that could bring up to 1,500 jobs to the Navy Yard. The reception for the most part was positive.

“It was gorgeous,” said Brady, remembering those days. “It was shock and awe, and ‘let’s fix it.’ Everybody wanted to be helpful. But then the dollar figures came in.”  

The actual cost of the liner wasn’t prohibitive. Cantor would’ve sold it to the right party for a few million. The expensive part was the redevelopment, estimated to cost anywhere from $200 to $500 million.  

At least one leader saw the future: The Daily News quoted an unnamed city official after the ship’s arrival who feared the SS United States “could very easily be the largest abandoned vehicle in the city.”

Terry Gillen, who was appointed by then-Mayor Ed Rendell to help develop a new master plan for the Navy Yard, remembers it was quickly determined the SS United States could not be docked at the Navy Yard. And this was during a period in which all kinds of crazy ideas were being trotted out for the area, even building a race track.  

Rendell’s director of communications Kevin Feeley told the Daily News in 1999, after the novelty of having a gigantic decaying ship in the Delaware had worn off, “There was never a feeling that this would be a feasible public investment.”

So the ship kept sitting there, costing its owner about $60,000 a month in docking fees and maintenance. That’s a tab of about $15 million since 1996.   

Supposedly two parties were interested in buying and redeveloping the ship in 1998. Then in 1999 “several people and groups” wanted it. In 2000, there were two “very, very viable offers.” Again and again, nothing materialized.

It was finally sold in 2003 to Norwegian Cruise Lines. The company had plans to make a cruise ship out of the SS United States. A feasibility study by Norwegian Cruise Lines quickly determined doing so would be too expensive even if it were possible. The company unloaded its albatross in 2010 to the SS United States Conservancy, which received $5.8M in funding from philanthropist Gerry Lenfest.   

Since then, it’s been up to the nonprofit to make the impossible and too expensive seem feasible. 

‘I don’t see it being financially viable’

They are developers who have taken on some of the riskiest, oddest projects in Philadelphia. Bart Blatstein turned the area around the abandoned Schmidt’s Brewery into a reasonably successful retail/apartment complex, at least until he sold to Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner . Alon Barzilay has turned churches and mills into apartments and lofts. Eric Blumenfeld has converted the Divine Lorraine Hotel into apartments, and the building is nearly ready after a little more than a year.  

They like history, and they know how to leave it intact while remaking it for the present. But when asked about the SS United States and whether it could ever be redeveloped their reactions were all pretty similar to Blumenfeld’s.

He laughed at the question for several seconds. Then, one word: “No.”

“I don’t see it being financially viable, unfortunately,” Blumenfeld said. “There’s great history to that ship.”

With any project, developers talk about the need for transforming an existing object or structure into something with higher and better use. The term essentially means finding a legal, physically possible way of turning an existing structure into something that not just endures, but is also profitable.

The bar for something better than a decaying, abandoned ship is not high. But exactly what the SS United States could become is debatable. Just like Norwegian Cruise Lines discovered, Crystal Cruises examined the possibility of returning the SS United States to the open seas and deemed it impossible last year. So cruise ship is out. The other options would be hotel (floatel!), apartments, entertainment, museum, retail, office or likely some type of mixture.

When Blumenfeld started on the Divine Lorraine, he said he cast aside much of his original ideas. This is common. Unexpected problems and opportunities happen with any project. But people redevelop old buildings all the time and have a template in mind.  

There is no template with the SS United States. The number of times old ocean liners have been redeveloped can be counted on one hand, the most prominent example being the Queen Mary in Los Angeles. It made its last trip in 1967 and the process of repurposing it into a museum/hotel/restaurant space began immediately. When it opened in 1971, the ship was widely known, contained many of its original flourishes and had not decayed over the years.

Still, for decades, ownership of the Queen Mary was passed from company to company , each having little, if any, financial success. The latest owners, as of last year, planned to spend about $15 million more on the ship and $250 million to redevelop the parking-lot-laden area around it.

SS United States developers would be gambling on 48 years of rot in an object whose heyday is remembered by few. The size of the ship is huge, 650,000 square feet. In comparison, the Piazza has 100,000 square feet of commercial space and an 80,000 square-foot courtyard. According to real estate research firm JLL, the combined square footage of all new office space brought on line into Philadelphia’s central business district in 2016 — the areas around Market Street, University City and the Navy Yard — was 891,000.  

“I don’t have a clue what the best use is for it,” Blatstein said.

Said Blumenfeld: “There has to be a financial path that at the end of the day you end up with something that the cost of acquisition, keeping it on the water and the cost of putting into it something that makes sense all comes together.” Blumenfeld said, “And I don’t think that that exists.”

Thomas Basile, a spokesperson for the SS United States Conservancy, said in a statement the nonprofit continues to meet with developers from across the country. Though Crystal Cruise Lines canceled its plans last year to redevelop the ship after a feasibility study, the study revealed the SS United States to still be structurally sound and capable of being moved.

“This is perhaps the most unique development opportunity in the nation and it is certainly not without its challenges,” Basile said. “But she is our flagship and a symbol of what we can accomplish when we work together.”

If developers were interested in the project, they likely couldn’t just grab a few investors and cobble together $500 million or even $200 million. Developers have enough trouble getting together $50 million, as Blumenfeld first did with the $44 million Divine Lorraine . Barzilay said projects of the magnitude of the SS United States often require partnering with banks, a sector usually unwilling to take risky gambles. Or government. Publicly-funded Lincoln Financial Field, for instance, cost $512 million.  

The closest the SS United States likely ever came to being saved was after Lenfest helped the Conservancy buy it in 2010. At the time, Foxwoods Casino was being planned for Philadelphia, on the Delaware River. Brady wanted to have a city-run casino . Within all these plans was the prospect of using the SS United States as part of the casino and a museum. Brady said renderings were made and conversations were had. But nothing ended up happening, despite pull from a US Congressman and one of Philadelphia’s most influential businessmen.      

“If anybody could’ve done it,” Blumenfeld, “it would’ve been Lenfest.”   

Scrap heap then saved, over and over

Some of Lenfest’s funding in 2010 went into sprucing up the SS United States. For a while, the ship shone brightly in South Philly.   

Without him and his money, the SS United States has primarily been in the news for a series of “last calls” to save it from the scrap heap. These are warning cries to supporters of the ship that it won’t be around much longer, unless they contribute money to the Conservancy.   

The most recent “last call” to save the SS United States was sounded in 2015 . That last call came one year after a 2014 last call  in the  Post . And that 2014 last call came after one in 2013 .

Each time the ship has been saved, the promise of redevelopment appears on the horizon. In December 2014, the Conservancy declared it had reached a “preliminary agreement” with an unnamed developer but noted “the project remains at an early and delicate phase.” In 2015, likely interested groups were RXR Realty and Youngwoo & Associates , who wanted to move it to New York City (RXR declined to comment and Youngwoo & Associates didn’t respond). The plan hasn’t materialized, and neither did the aforementioned deal with Crystal Cruises reached in early 2016. Crystal Cruises wanted to return the SS United States to the seas. Months later, last fall, the company cited regulatory and engineering obstacles . The idea was shelved and the sale nullified.  

Basile said the ship has received donations to keep the ship around from people in every state and in several other countries. No taxpayer funds have been used for it.

The SS United States can remain in Philly so long as the Conservancy pays its expensive bills and the pier’s owners are fine with the tenant. Pier 82, home of the SS United States, is owned by the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority and operated by Horizon Stevedoring.   

“As things stand now, PRPA has little say about the use of Pier 82’s north berth for the vessel,” said spokesperson Joe Menta. “Of course, we’d like to see that berth going back to active cargo-handling use.  We also hope for a happy end to the saga of the SS United States at the same time.”

That is essentially the story of the SS United States: It’s here in Philly, and nobody wants to tell a historic ship to go sink, despite the difficulties of saving it. Mayor Jim Kenney, in a statement, said he “believes the ship should be put to some good use,” but the city has no concrete plans for what it could do with it. Brady said, “I can’t say, ‘no, get rid of it.’ I don’t want to be the person to say scrap it.”

The Congressman hears about the SS United States from his constituents from time to time. They used to enjoy seeing the giant ship as they traveled down Columbus Boulevard, especially after Lenfest had paid to light it up. That’s been changing the last few years.

“They’re starting to like it less,” Brady said, “because it’s decaying so bad.”

Mark Dent is a reporter/curator at BillyPenn. He previously worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he covered the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Penn State football and the Penn State administration. His... More by Mark Dent

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Search continues on schuylkill river for missing kayaker near king of prussia [map], cruise firm: restoration of historic ocean liner in philadelphia too pricey.

PHILADELPHIA >> Don’t buy tickets quite yet for a luxury sail on the SS United States.

Plans to return the historic ocean liner to the high seas are being abandoned for a second time after a cruise company concludes it’s not feasible.

Los Angeles-based Crystal Cruises will instead make a $350,000 donation to the conservation group that owns the ship, which has been sitting idle at a Philadelphia wharf for two decades. The company had pledged to spend at least $700 million to return the ship, which is bigger than the Titanic, to its glory days as a luxury ocean liner. But the task proved too great, even though they found the ship structurally sound.

“Unfortunately, the hurdles that would face us when trying to bring a 65-year-old vessel up to modern safety, design and international regulatory compliance have proven just too great,” Crystal Cruises President Edie Rodriguez said in a statement.

Norwegian Cruise Lines announced a similar overhaul in 2003 that did not materialize for similar reasons.

Susan Gibbs, executive director of the conservancy, said the ship could still be turned into a waterfront attraction, perhaps with a museum component, in New York or elsewhere.

In the 1950s, the ship carried everyone from royalty to immigrants across the Atlantic Ocean, accompanied by three on-board orchestras. It was the biggest and fastest ocean liner that had ever been built in the United States at the time.

On its maiden voyage in 1952, the liner crossed the Atlantic in three days, 10 hours, 42 minutes, a record that stood until 1990. The ship was decommissioned in 1969.

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cruiser olympia

Cruiser Olympia

Cruiser Olympia (C-6) is the oldest remaining steel ship afloat, built during a transformative time in American culture, science, and technology. The ship was placed into commission by the United States Navy for the first time in February 1895 as a state-of-the-art man of war.

Since the mid-1990s, more than $10 million has been invested in preserving and restoring this national icon. As custodian of Olympia,   Independence Seaport Museum is committed to her restoration following the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Historic Vessel Preservation Projects, 1990.

26 YEARS OF SERVICE

Cruiser Olympia rose to fame as Commodore (later Admiral) George Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay.

Images of the ship and the battle appeared on the front page of newspapers from coast to coast. These were followed by magazine covers and, eventually, book covers. A cottage industry sprang up of items intended for parlors across the country. Clocks, lithographs, etchings, mirrors, and lamps all featured the ship.

The most famous vessel of the time

Cruiser Olympia rose to fame as Commodore (later Admiral) George Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. This battle not only marked the beginning of the Spanish-American War, but also positioned America’s Navy as a world power. Fittingly, her final act of service was the transportation of the American Unknown Soldier of World War I from France to the United States in 1921. The soldier now lies entombed at Arlington National Cemetery. As Olympia was the most famous vessel of the time period, the selection served as a way to commemorate both the ship’s and soldier’s service.

Particulars

• Length: 344 feet
• Beam: 53 feet
• Displacement: 5,870 tons
• Crew: 33 officers, 396 enlisted men
• Top Speed: 22 knots (25mph)
• Coal Consumption at Top Speed: 633 lbs/minute

27 years Of service

Over Olympia’s 27-year service life, which saw two wars and the administration of six presidents, thousands of Americans served aboard as commissioned officers and enlisted sailors.

Olympia’s design comes out of a period known as the New Steel Navy, an era in American ship design from the late 1880s through the early 1900s.  She was one of the first ships to be equipped with refrigeration and radio communication systems, and one of the first to use steam for a multitude of tasks.  Of particular interest, Olympia was equipped with a Fessenden oscillator installed in 1917.  The Fessenden oscillator would send out sounds through the water that were bounced back by solid objects.  Invented as a result of the 1912 Titanic disaster in order to provide ships with a way of detecting obstacles (man-made or natural) ahead.  This is the only example of this early sonar device still known to exist.

Historic Ships Collections

Along with Cruiser Olympia and Submarine Becuna , the Seaport Museum also maintains a vast collection of historical artifacts and records relating to both vessels. The Cruiser Olympia Collection has been inventoried and a collections guide can be found on the Online Catalog page of the website.

additional resources

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visit the seaport museum

Immerse yourself in award-winning and interactive exhibits and climb aboard the oldest floating steel warship in the world on Cruiser Olympia and submerge yourself aboard the World War II-era Submarine Becuna .

211 S. Columbus Blvd. Philadelphia, PA 19106 215-413-8655

Monday – Friday: 10am -5pm Saturday: 10am – 5pm Sunday: 10am – 5pm Last admission: 4:30pm

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Rebuilding for the future, in more ways than one

Seeing the Delaware from Camden, and interacting for its betterment and our own

From her home, Adriana Amador-Chacon sees people having fun on the water, but also pollution. Individuals have a role in keeping the river clean, she says.

Where is it going to happen?

The Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild also wants to find a permanent “home” for Gazela between educational seafaring voyages. The current berth at Penn’s Landing is not ideal. Brandt worries there is too much pedestrian traffic.

That said, Joe Forkin, president of the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, thinks having Gazela floating on the river adds to the charm.

“It’s nice to have working tall ships along the waterfront. Ships add to the maritime history of the waterfront, offer volunteers, the public, and school groups an opportunity to learn about the maritime/sailing industry, and provide an opportunity to engage with the river in an active way,” Forkin said.

PSPG’s vision is a restoration shipyard that would welcome visitors to see the work being done and connect them with the working waterfront and the Delaware River’s rich maritime past. They have their eyes on a sliver or waterfront behind the Old Navy store at the back of Columbus Commons, just past the feral cat colony . In the water, there are the decaying remains of two finger piers and three hulls of old ships, only visible at low tide — the “three sisters”, as Brandt calls the sunken vessels.

If the PSPG gets planning permission from the landowners, it envisions a land-bound workshop with picnic and recreational space. That would be the dream mooring destination for Gazela and the future generations who will keep it afloat.

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FOUR FAMOUS SHIPS OF PHILADELPHIA

At Patriot Harbor Lines we love to showcase hidden Philly gems. Today’s post will focus on four of our favorite famous ships. These ships are highlights of our Delaware River Harbor Cruise, Penn’s Landing to Schuylkill Banks Cruise and our Walnut to Walnut Cruise. Philadelphia, the birthplace of the US Navy and at one time a shipbuilding mecca is home to the world’s oldest floating steel Navy vessel, the Navy’s most decorated ship in its history and the worlds fastest ship. Our guests love seeing these historic ships up close and we love sharing these ships via PhillyByBoat.

Cruiser Olympia

Olympia is the remaining link between the age of sail and the age of steam in naval construction. She preserves marvels of engineering in their infancy including electricity, refrigeration and communications. She is a reflection of the influence of the Victorian and Edwardian eras on America, having been built before WWI swept away the aristocracies of Europe. She brings alive the inventiveness and can-do spirit of burgeoning American engineering. If you would like to tour the Olympia tickets are available at the Independence Seaport Museum.

Battleship New Jersey

USS New Jersey (BB-62) is an Iowa-class battleship and was the second ship of the United States Navy to be named after the state of New Jersey. New Jersey earned more battle stars for combat actions than the other three completed Iowa-class battleships and was the only US battleship providing gunfire support during the Vietnam War.

During World War II, New Jersey shelled targets on Guam and Okinawa, and screened aircraft carriers conducting raids in the Marshall Islands. During the Korean War, she was involved in raids up and down the North Korean coast, after which she was decommissioned into the United States Navy reserve “mothball fleet. She was briefly reactivated in 1968 and sent to Vietnam to support US troops before returning to the mothball fleet in 1969. Reactivated once more in the 1980s as part of the 600-ship Navy program, New Jersey was modernized to carry missiles and recommissioned for service. In 1983, she participated in US operations during the Lebanese Civil War.

New Jersey was decommissioned for the last time in 1991 (after serving a total of 21 years in the active fleet), having earned a Navy Unit Commendation for service in Vietnam and 19 battle and campaign stars for combat operations during World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Lebanese Civil War, and service in the Persian Gulf. She was donated to the Home Port Alliance in Camden, New Jersey, and began her career as a museum ship 15 October 2001. If you would like to plan a visit to the Battleship New Jersey, click here .

SS United States

Constructed from 1950 to 1952 at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Newport News, Virginia, the hull was constructed in a dry dock. United States was built to exacting Navy specifications, which required that the ship be heavily compartmentalized, and have separate engine rooms to optimize wartime survival. A large part of the construction was prefabricated. The ship’s hull was made up of 183,000 pieces.

The construction of the ship’s superstructure involved the most extensive use of aluminum in any construction project up to that time, which posed a galvanic corrosion challenge to the builders in joining the aluminum superstructure to the steel decks below. However, the extensive use of aluminum meant significant weight savings.  United States had the most powerful steam turbines of any merchant marine vessel at the time, with a total power of 240,000 shaft horsepower (180 MW) delivered to four 18-foot (5.5 m)-diameter manganese-bronze propellers. The ship was capable of steaming astern at over 20 knots (37 km/h; 23 mph), and could carry enough fuel and stores to steam non-stop for over 10,000 nautical miles (19,000 km; 12,000 mi) at a cruising speed of 35 knots (65 km/h; 40 mph).

Aircraft Carrier John F. Kennedy

The ship was officially christened 27 May 1967 by Jacqueline Kennedy and her 9-year-old daughter, Caroline, two days short of what would have been President Kennedy’s 50th birthday. The ship entered service September 7, 1968.

After nearly 40 years of service, John F. Kennedy was officially decommissioned on August 1, 2007. She is berthed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, and, until late 2017, was available for donation as a museum and memorial to a qualified organization. In late 2017, the Navy revoked her “donation hold” status and designated her for dismantling. The name has been adopted by the future Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy (CVN-79).

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Eagles Running Back Saquon Barkley Makes Surprising Claim About Giants

The newest Eagles running back had something surprising to say about his old team

• Author: Patrick McAvoy

In this story:

The Philadelphia Eagles' offense certainly will look a little different next season.

Philadelphia entered the offseason looking for ways to upgrade the roster after a devastating end to last season. The Eagles struck early and landed one of the top running backs in the National Football League as they signed two-time Pro Bowl select Saquon Barkley to a three-year deal.

He spent the first six years of his NFL career with the rival New York Giants and now will attempt to help take the Eagles to the next level.

Some were surprised when he decided to leave the Giants and some fans in New York certainly weren't happy. He even had a negative reception at a recent New York Knicks playoff game. Fans even took to social media to discuss his decision to leave New York but to some surprise, he mentioned that the Giants never offered him a deal.

"Let me educate some of you fans here," Barkley said. "I can’t bail or become a traitor if I never got an offer to come back. So, I went to the organization I felt that was the best and after already being here for a month man I’m excited to be an Eagle! Go birds."

The fact that the Giants didn't Barkley should come as a surprise. He dealt with some injuries, but when he was healthy he had the upside to be one of the best offensive weapons in football.

He now will have a chance to get some revenge on the Giants for the next few years while wearing an Eagles jersey.

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Virginia EMT is latest U.S. tourist arrested in Turks and Caicos after ammo allegedly found in luggage

By Kris Van Cleave

Updated on: April 26, 2024 / 8:52 PM EDT / CBS News

A 30-year-old U.S. man was arrested in Turks and Caicos last weekend after ammunition was allegedly found in his luggage, CBS News has learned, making him the latest of several Americans in recent months who found themselves in a similar predicament in the British territory. 

Tyler Wenrich was taken into custody after officials allegedly found two bullets in his backpack April 20 as he was about to board a cruise ship.

Possessing a gun or ammunition is prohibited in Turks and Caicos, but tourists were previously often able to just pay a fine. In February, however, a court order mandated that even tourists in the process of leaving the country are subject to prison time.

The Virginia EMT and father now faces the potential of a mandatory minimum prison sentence of up to 12 years.

"I feel like, as a very honest mistake, that 12 years is absurd," his wife, Jeriann Wenrich, told CBS News Friday. 

Wenrich says her husband had been on the island for less than a day when the arrest occurred.

"My son's only 18 months old, and I just don't want to him to grow up without a dad," Wenrich said.

There are now at least four American tourists facing the possibility of lengthy prison sentences for similar charges, including a 72-year-old man, Michael Lee Evans, who was arrested in December and pled guilty to possession of seven rounds of ammo. He appeared before the court on Wednesday via a video conference link. Currently on bail in the U.S. for medical reasons, Evans has a sentencing hearing in June. A fifth person, Michael Grim of Indiana, served nearly six months in prison after he pleaded guilty to mistakenly bringing ammo in his checked luggage for a vacation. 

Ryan Watson, a 40-year-old father of two from Oklahoma, was released from a Turks and Caicos jail on $15,000 bond Wednesday. Following a birthday vacation with his wife, he was arrested April 12 when airport security allegedly found four rounds of hunting ammo in his carry-on bag earlier this month. 

His wife, Valerie Watson, flew home to Oklahoma Tuesday after learning she would not be charged. However, as part of his bond agreement, her husband must remain on the island and check in every Tuesday and Thursday at the Grace Bay Police Station while his case moves forward.

In an interview Friday from the island, Ryan Watson told CBS News that he checked the bag before he packed it.

"I opened it up and kind of give it a little shimmy, didn't see anything, didn't hear anything," he said.

TSA also acknowledged that officers missed the ammo when Watson's bag was screened at the checkpoint on April 7 at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.

In a statement provided to CBS News Friday, a TSA spokesperson said that "four rounds of ammunition were not detected" in Watson's bag "during the security screening."

The spokesperson said that "an oversight occurred that the agency is addressing internally."

"It was my mistake," Ryan Watson said. "It was very innocent. And I just pray that, compassion and consideration, because there was zero criminal intent."

In a statement Friday, the Turks and Caicos government said that it "reserves the right to enforce its legislation and all visitors must follow its law enforcement procedures."

Following the CBS News report on Ryan Watson earlier this week, the State Department reissued a warning to American tourists traveling to Turks and Caicos to "carefully check their luggage for stray ammunition or forgotten weapons."

• Turks and Caicos

Kris Van Cleave is CBS News' senior transportation and national correspondent based in Phoenix.

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10-month-old girl abducted after mother, another woman shot dead, police say

An amber alert has been issued for the infant from new mexico.

LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD/Gray News) - Police in New Mexico say a 10-month-old girl is missing after her mother and another woman were found dead in a park from apparent gunshot wounds.

An Amber Alert has been issued for 10-month-old Eleia Maria Torres. She has brown eyes and brown hair. She is 28 inches tall and weighs 23 pounds.

Police say someone called 911 about 4:30 p.m. Friday, reporting two dead women at Ned Houk Park, about five miles north of Clovis, New Mexico. Responding officers found the two women, identified as 23-year-old Samantha Cisneros, and 23-year-old Taryn Allen lying on the ground near a silver minivan. Both women were from Texico, KCBD reports .

A 5-year-old girl, who police say is Cisneros’ daughter, was found nearby with a head injury. She was taken to Plains Regional Medical Center then was transferred to a hospital in Lubbock, Texas.

Police found an infant car seat, stroller and a small baby bottle at the scene. Officers were concerned there was an infant present when the crime occurred and immediately began a search for the baby, according to a news release.

After speaking with family, investigators learned Cisneros was mother to the injured 5-year-old girl and 10-month-old Eleia. Police believe the killer abducted the baby.

Police say there are currently no suspect details, but it’s believed the perpetrator may have left in a maroon Honda car.

If you know where Eleia is or who may be responsible for this crime, call the Clovis Police Department at (575) 769-1921 or call 911.

Police would also like to remind you that information can be provided anonymously by using the department’s tip411 program, which can be accessed by going to www.police.cityofclovis.org . Anonymous tips can also be provided to the Curry County Crime Stoppers at 575-763-7000.

Copyright 2024 KCBD via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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