The café in the Philadelphia branch of IKEA has one of the most sublime views in America. As you eat your meatballs with lingonberry jam, instead of the usual endless car park, you gaze onto the vast bulk of a 990-foot-long Atlantic liner, moored at Pier 82.
The SS United States dominates the whole area: its hull fills the view from the first-floor of IKEA, and its giant smokestacks loom over every building. Normally indifferent to its surroundings, the Swedish furniture retailer has been forced to acknowledge the presence of this monster. Notices in the café windows refer interested readers to a website. The store in any case is the newcomer – it opened in 2004, eight years after the liner’s arrival.
The ship remains intact structurally, but is in an evident state of decay. Rust shows through the black livery of the hull and the bright red of the smokestacks is half gone. The great port of Philadelphia is full of ruins of the industrial age, many of them ships, but this one outdoes them all. It has inadvertently become one of the sights of the city, to the irritation of the local stevedores.
This is, of course, no ordinary ruin, a superlative vessel if ever there was one. The last, and largest, liner built by the US, it entered service in 1952 in direct competition with Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary. It was famous for three things. First, it was very light. Its aluminium superstructure kept its displacement to 47,000 tons, 60 per cent of the similarly-sized Queens (its aluminium construction also accounts for its good condition today). As a result, it was also unbelievably quick. It broke the record for the fastest ever crossing of the Atlantic in 1952, completing its maiden voyage from New York to Britain in three days and ten hours, at an average speed of 35 knots. Finally, it was wood-free. Its designer, William Gibb had a neurotic fear of fire. The grand piano and the butcher’s block, it was said, were the only items made from trees. Superlative it might have been, but it lasted less than two decades in service. Against increasing competition from the airlines, it was retired in 1969.
The SS United States’ history from that point on is decidedly baroque. The US Navy maintained it, hermetically sealed, for nine years before declaring in 1978 that it had no further interest. It then had a series of owners who all declared their intention to put it back in active service. First, Richard Hadley, a Seattle entrepreneur who envisaged a timeshare cruiseship. When this plan failed in 1984, the SS United States was sold to Fred Mayer, who headed a consortium that aimed for a more conventional refit. Their plan failed after a two-year sojourn in the Ukraine for asbestos removal (two American tourists, Ted and Trish Jamison told the boat’s conservationists that they saw it towed through the Bosphorus on a vacation to Istanbul – ‘it was like seeing a ghost’).
It was at this stage that Philadelphia businessman, Edward Cantor agreed to take on the debt, and bring it back to the USA. On Cantor’s death in 2003, its future again looked doubtful, until the giant cruise line NCL stepped up in 2006, promising a historically accurate restoration, and an all-American crew. NCL’s plans for the perfect post 9/11 cruise came unstuck with the global financial crisis of 2008, and a one-way trip to the breakers yard in Chittagong seemed certain – that is, before the intervention of Gerry Lenfest. The Philadelphia philanthropist donated $300,000 to the conservation in 2010, buying time to develop a commercial future.
The latest plan, by Stephen Varenhorst Architects, consists of a refurbished United States, kitted out as a hotel. Forming the heart of a casino complex, close to the liner’s current location. I sailed on the United States as a baby. Somewhere, there is a photograph of me on deck, in my mother’s arms, as we left New York. Like any other fan, I would far rather the casino than the scrapyard. But the ship’s present interest lies substantially in its ruined state, as even the architects of the new scheme would have to admit.
Its presence is astonishing, precisely because it belongs to another age, and has not been, even partially, recuperated. The casino scheme would bring the ship into the modern economy, making it an attraction curiously similar to the retail park over which it currently looms. For anyone who remembers the industrial age, there is something sad about this process. However, the alternative – losing the ship – would be worse.
