SS United States to be towed from Phila., launching transition into artificial reef

The 1,000-foot vessel, hailed in the 1950s as America's Greatest Ocean Liner, is scheduled to be towed from a pier in Philadelphia to Mobile, Ala., and undergo preparations to be scuttled off the Florida Panhandle.

The radar mast and iconic funnels of the SS United States are shown at Philadelphia's Pier 82 in a 2012 photo. The mast and funnels will be preserved for a new land-based museum honoring the ship in Florida after it is scuttled and turned into the world's largest artificial reef. 

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

Nov. 11 (UPI) -- The historic ocean liner SS United States, whose fate had been in limbo for years, will begin its transition into the world's largest sunken artificial reef beginning this week in Philadelphia, its owner says.

On Thursday, the 1,000-foot vessel, hailed in the 1950s as America's Greatest Ocean Liner, is scheduled to be towed from a pier in Philadelphia to Mobile, Ala., where it will undergo preparations to be scuttled off the Florida Panhandle by its new owner, Okaloosa County, Fla.
The county plans to make it the crown jewel in its ongoing efforts to boost fishing and sport diving tourism by creating new artificial reefs in the Gulf of Mexico.

After gaining title to the vessel last month, county officials announced last week a tentative schedule that called for the ship to be moved from its home of 28 years just before noon Thursday.

After first being repositioned along the waterfront, it will await the next low tide, which is set to come early Friday morning. At that point, tugboats will begin to maneuver the liner into the Delaware River to begin its two-week journey to Mobile.

Along the way, the Walt Whitman Bridge (carrying Interstate 76), the Commodore Barry Bridge (U.S. Hwy. 322) and the Delaware Memorial Bridge (I-295) will be closed to traffic as the massive ship is towed down the river into Delaware Bay.

That's not only for safety precautions, but also to prevent traffic jams caused by motorists stopping on the highway to take pictures of the spectacle.

The county has provided a link to track the movement of the ship as it heads toward Alabama.

New queen of artificial reefs

After it reaches Mobile, contractors will take a year to prepare it for its new life as an undersea tourist attraction and game fishing hotspot by removing hazardous materials, non-metal parts and fuel to ensure it is environmentally safe, as would befit an attraction designed to tap the ecotourism market.

Meanwhile, modifications also will be made to ensure that the 3,300-ton vessel will land upright at the bottom of the Gulf when it is deployed sometime next year at an as-yet undetermined site expected to be about 20 miles south of the Destin-Fort Walton Beach area.

Those modifications include poking holes in the ship's hull to facilitate its sinking, Okaloosa County Public Information Officer Nick Tomecek told UPI.

"It's actually pretty hard to sink a ship," he said. "They'll cut some holes on the outside, on the inside and all around the vessel. Once they tow it to the spot, they'll use a pump on the tow boat to begin filling it with water. As that water fills the ship, it sinks lower and lower to where those holes are cut. As more and more water goes in, the ship eventually goes down.

"A ship of this size, it could take hours before it's filled. On smaller ships, sometimes people have to get off them quickly because within a half-hour or 45, they're going underwater."

Okaloosa County began its program of deploying artificial reefs in 1976 and has created 564 reef sites since, including such other ships as the 110-foot former research vessel R/V Manta and the RMS Cyclops, a 105-foot supply ship, both of which were submerged last year.

But none is quite like the SS United States, which with its deployment will surpass the record for the world's biggest underwater reef now held by the USS Oriskany, a 911-foot former aircraft carrier scuttled off Pensacola, Fla., in May 2006.

Glamorous mid-century heritage

The SS United States' 17 years of service began with a bang in 1952, when it set a new Atlantic crossing speed record on its maiden voyage. For the rest of the decade, it was praised on two continents as the most impressive passenger ship in the world.

The superliner was designed by renowned naval architect William Francis Gibbs, in conjunction with the Pentagon under strict secrecy because the government wanted it to be capable of doubling as a Cold War-era troop transport if needed.

That legacy and its sheer size make the SS United States not only the biggest ship ever converted into an artificial reef, but undoubtedly the most famous and significant.

In its heyday day stretching into the early 1960s, it attracted a Who's Who of celebrities, world leaders and passengers who paid premium prices to travel in its ultra-modern staterooms while zooming across the ocean from New York to European ports in just under 3 1/2 days.

Stars of stage and screen and world leaders including four U.S. presidents dotted its passenger list. Among those plied the Atlantic Ocean in its 23 public rooms, 395 staterooms and 14 first-class suites were Marlon Brando, Coco Chanel, Sean Connery, Duke Ellington, Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne.

But with the dawn of the jet age, ocean liner travel quickly fell out of favor, and by 1969 the SS United Sates was taken out of service.

Its original owner, United States Lines, sold the vessel in the 1970s, and it subsequently passed through several owners, each of whom unsuccessfully attempted to return the iconic ship to service and profitability.

Until the Florida county bought it last month, its most recent owner had been the SS United States Conservancy, a non-profit headed by Susan Gibbs, granddaughter of designer William Francis Gibbs.

The conservancy saved it from the scrapyard in 2009 and spent the next 15 years trying to find a way to preserve its legacy through various plans with commercial partners. The proposals included converting it into a tourism destination, a hotel, an events center and other types of facilities at various locations around the country, such as New York City and Miami.

None of those efforts bore fruit, however, and earlier this year, the owner of the Philadelphia pier at which it had been moored since 1996 sued to evict the ship. Okaloosa County's bid to purchase it as part of a $10 million tourism project was subsequently accepted.

'State-of-art' land-based museum planned

A key element of the deal was an agreement to construct a land-based museum in the Destin-Fort Walton Beach area to honor the ship's legacy and tying it into the pitch for visitors who may want to experience the ship both as an undersea reef and as a historic piece of Americana through "immersive, state-of-the-art" exhibits.

Susan Gibbs told UPI that while the museum is still in the planning stages, it will likely be designed to provide a tribute not only to the rich history of the ship, but also to the heady era of post-World War II American culture it came to represent.

"It's our goal to keep the story of the SS United States going into the future," she said. "We want to transport visitors to various moments in time and feel like there's an interaction with some of the celebrity passengers and fascinating figures that traveled aboard the ship.

"The idea is not solely to tell the story of a particular iconic ship, but to put the SS United States into a historical context with the post-war moment when it traveled to these European ports of call. There was just an incredible admiration and reverence for the symbolism of the nation at that time."

One such moment came at the end of its record-breaking maiden voyage on July 3, 1952, when its arrival in Southampton, England, drew a cheering throng of almost 70,000 to the docks.

The museum's interpretive elements also will honor the Mid-Century Modern "design moment" that the ship's interior decor and furnishings embody, demonstrated via the conservancy's extensive archival holdings of photographs, home movies and first-hand stories of passengers and crew members, Gibbs said.

Immersive visual technology will allow visitors to "experience" being aboard the superliner's bridge during a North Atlantic storm, while a variety of artifacts will also be on display, such as original artwork, murals and sculptures from the ship's public spaces and first-class suites.

Perhaps the most impressive artefacts are to be its radar mast and one or both of its iconic, 55-foot-tall funnels, which were the largest ever put to sea.

The red-white-and-blue funnels were designed by William Francis Gibbs to the give the ship an unmistakable look, and like much of its superstructure, were made of lightweight aluminum.