A little history with the SS United States

Enjoy the video.......

Cool video! That was very interesting. It would be neat to see the inside too. Thanks for posting it.

we live in phila pa area and see that ship all the time its a shame it is sitting there rusting away

A few pieces are saved in her namesake dining venue on board the Celebrity Infinity.

A few months back, I was watching an old rerun of What's My Line. One of the commercials was for Remington Rand calculators being used on the SS United States. Very primitive compared to what they have today!

Eileen

This is so tragic that our government or the private sector will not invest in this amazing piece of our country. Its like letting the empire state build fall into ruin. Our nation should be ashamed of this. It really bothers me. Millions upon millions of dollars are wasted every year on ridiculous things . At the very least the could restore her to some kind of hotel like the Queen Mary.....Shame on America for this.

Here is some video from inside and on the decks of the ship. I would have loved to seen her in her prime.

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This is so tragic that our government or the private sector will not invest in this amazing piece of our country. Its like letting the empire state build fall into ruin. Our nation should be ashamed of this. It really bothers me. Millions upon millions of dollars are wasted every year on ridiculous things . At the very least the could restore her to some kind of hotel like the Queen Mary.....Shame on America for this.

One could get involved. Perhaps start a crowd funding project.

Enjoy the video.......

My father took me down to Southampton when she was docked there not long after winning the Blue Riband. At least one of the Queens was there at the same time. Don't remember it clearly as I was only 5 or 6yrs old then :)

When I was 9 years old, my uncle had a series of Time-Life books on ships, and one of them was Ocean Liners...I would go to his house each summer and seemingly read that book over and over, and the United States became etched in my mind. I think that's one reason I love cruising so much to this day...trying to relive the romantic ocean liner era that I never got to experience.

I had the opportunity to spend a night aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach a couple of years ago in the hotel. I expected it to be well restored, almost to museum-style quality...instead, you get a snapshot of the ship mostly as it was in the 60s before it was retired. While they have done a great job keeping things in good condition, you can tell that they have to invest quite a bit of work into just maintaining the current level of the ship and to fight against time.

I have loosely followed along with the SS United States Conservancy group and hope they can get somewhere, but they've been struggling for awhile now, and seeing this video made my heart sink a bit. I'm not sure what I expected, but seeing it really gutted and decaying made me finally realize what a massive undertaking restoring this ship will be - I was really shocked with how much it has been stripped down. I don't see how it can really be feasible at this point...even turning it into some sort of museum would be a tremendous undertaking as so much has been removed that it doesn't do justice or honor to the memory of the ship in its heyday. The Queen Mary is cool...it still feels "alive" because you can see all the original woodwork and some furnishings, etc. The inside of the United States looks like a worn out freighter, and it takes a lot of imagination to think of what it looked like back in the day...a real shame that it's gone this far.

Complete travesty... why do we (as a society) have such little respect for our engineering and social history? Agree with all your comments above. The QE2 sits in Dubai, and sounds like she has taken a real knocking by the tropical heat. I remember fondly being taken on board the QE2 by my father as a child and recall a wonderful tapestry showing her launching in Glasgow (which I hear was sadly thrown overboard along with other artworks by drunk crewmembers after her final passenger voyage).Let's hope both the United States and the QE2 get the respect they deserve as icons of the modern world.

As much of a champion of the US flag industry, and Merchant Marine history as I am, I take the opposite view, and feel that doing much of anything with the SSUS is a waste of time and money.

What made the SSUS unique? Her power plant, which is now a rusting, rotting pile of junk, which if you wanted to memorialize it could be done on shore. But even this is an example of US "brute force" engineering, of putting an incredible amount of power into a hull to be able to push it beyond the hull's natural maximum speed.

The interior of the ship, with its Art Deco decor is all gone. Why? Because, due to the SS Normandie fire during WWII, most of the SSUS's interior joiner work (the walls and ceilings you see, not the structural steel behind it) were made with asbestos fibers, which was removed, politically correctly or not, in Turkey decades ago.

Crystal's, and before that, NCL's, attempts to bring the ship back to service were ludicrous from the beginning, given the changes in regulations and cruising demographics (there weren't cruising demographics back when the SSUS was sailing!) today.

Emotion is getting a bit ahead of reality and economics with this - some of the same was probably said about the Concorde.

Emotion is getting a bit ahead of reality and economics with this - some of the same was probably said about the Concorde.

.... and there are some well preserved Concordes around (with some excellent tours, such as that at Manchester Aiport,UK) that allow us to still marvel at the engineering spectacle! I guess one difference is that the Concordes were well stored and looked after once they were removed from active service, but the same can't be said for the poor old SS United States....

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It's very sad to see what has happened to a beautiful ship. I saw relatives off on her maiden voyage. My great uncle oversaw the building of the ship in Newport News and sailed her on her maiden voyage.

I wish they could have refurbished it. My mother came over on it when she came to the United States to marry my dad .

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I worked at US Lines while it was still sailing in late 60's wish I had the chance to sail her, many of my co-workers cruised her several times. company was located at 1 Broadway and we had perfect view of ships sailing into NYC