The SS United States: The mighty ship that broke the record as the Fastest Transatlantic Ship in the world now left to rust
Pride of the oceans: The liner SS United States was a record-breaker. In 1952 she took the Blue Ribbon for the fastest transatlantic crossing — a record she’s held onto ever since.
The following written content from Christopher Ross
At the age of 10, David Macaulay immigrated to America from England in 1957 with his mother, brother, and sister aboard the SS United States — a massive, gleaming ocean liner that had been in operation for just five years, and would remain in service only another 12.
The family boarded in Southampton on England’s southeast coast, where the passenger ship’s six-story-tall funnels rose up over the docks like two huge fins, painted in blocks of red, white, and blue, their aerodynamic shape signaling the vessel’s race-ready design.
The SS United States held — and, incredibly, still holds today — the fastest transatlantic speed record for a liner, and possessed a secret double identity. Two-thirds of its $78 million construction costs had been subsidized by the US government so that the liner could be requisitioned by the military and converted to a troop transport ship with the capacity to carry 14,000 soldiers.
With a stunning horsepower of 247,785, she was capable of exceeding 38 knots and could outrun most battleships.Despite her lightweight frame, she was engineered to be practically indestructible. “You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her,” the ship’s designer, self-taught naval architect William Francis Gibbs, was known to say.
Recalling the graceful lines of England’s famous Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary ocean liners but filled out with American muscle, she was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a product of the postwar era’s heady mix of power and pride.
Macaulay knew none of this when he boarded the ship as a boy. Later in life, he would become fascinated by the architecture and inner workings of majestic structures, authoring and illustrating well-known children’s books like”Cathedral” and “Castle.
“But his primary impressions on that five-day trip across the ocean had less to do with engineering than with space and time — specifically, the yawning monotony of each while crossing the Atlantic by sea.”I remember that the whole thing was vast,” Macaulay says of the SS United States. “It was very clean. The floors were highly polished, always spotless. The paint was fresh. There was a kind of chemical cleanness, and an anonymity of the decks, the long passages, similar doors.
“A porthole in his family’s room looked out over an endless blue horizon, unbroken even by other ships — an image and memory that helped inspire his illustrated book about the SS United States, “Crossing on Time,” released in 2019. One of the book’s pictures situates the ship against the seemingly infinite backdrop of the North Atlantic.
At nearly 1,000 feet in length, roughly the height of the Chrysler Building, the SS United States would be the 16th tallest skyscraper in New York City if stood upright. Yet against the stretch of ocean, it looks positively small.
Growing up in the United States, Macaulay didn’t think much about the vessel that had brought him there, until many years later he found himself in Philadelphia for a conference.
While crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge, he looked down on the gently flowing Delaware River below and recognized the familiar, fleet form of the SS United States docked at Pier 82.
“I thought, my God, that’s my ship.”Since 1996, the ship has remained moored in Philadelphia, a city that is home to many old and forgotten things, where it appears like a mirage from the parking lot of a shopping center across the Christopher Columbus Boulevard — spectacularly and surreally large.
“A lady in waiting” is how Susan Gibbs, the executive director of the SS United States Conservancy and the granddaughter of the ship’s designer, describes the liner. Read more from CNN
Follow similar interesting unbiased news stories from News Without Politics
