Today, the SS United States goes to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
At 1 p.m. Central time, crews about 22 nautical miles southwest of Destin-Fort Walton Beach are scheduled to open valves connected to the ship’s original seawater intake pipes and let the Gulf in. If everything goes to plan, it should take about 45 minutes for the fastest ocean liner ever built to slip beneath the surface and settle upright on the sea floor, where she’ll become the world’s largest artificial reef.
The sinking was originally set for Thursday, November 12th, but forecast high winds pushed it up a day. That means she’s going down on Veterans Day, which feels fitting for a ship that was secretly designed to carry an entire Army division if the country ever needed her. And, the United States Lines announced her withdrawal from service on November 11, 1969. Fifty-seven years later to the day, her story ends.
I’ve written about the SS United States a few times on this site, from the news that Okaloosa County planned to buy her to how to watch the sinking. But today I want to look back at what she actually was, because before she was a rusting hulk on a Philadelphia pier, she was the most impressive passenger ship America ever produced.
America’s Answer to the European Superliners
For most of the first half of the 20th century, the North Atlantic belonged to Europe. Britain had the Mauretania and the Queen Mary. France had the Normandie. Germany had the Bremen and the Europa. America had plenty of money and plenty of shipyards, but it never had a true superliner of its own.
That changed thanks to William Francis Gibbs, a self-taught naval architect who spent much of his life obsessed with building the fastest, safest ship on the ocean.
The SS United States was built by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Virginia, with significant funding from the U.S. government. There was a catch to that money. Coming out of World War II, the Navy wanted a ship that could be quickly converted into a troop transport, and the United States was designed to carry about 14,000 troops if called into service. Because of that, many of her specs, including her hull design and her true top speed, were treated as military secrets for years.
Her keel was laid on February 8, 1950 and was christened and floated out on June 23, 1951. An incredibly fast build for an equally incredibly fast liner.
SS United States By the Numbers
- Length: 990 feet
- Beam: 101.5 feet
- Gross tonnage: 53,329
- Passengers: 1,972 (894 First Class, 524 Cabin Class and 554 Tourist Class)
- Crew: 1,044
- Troop capacity: About 14,000
- Top trial speed: 38.32 knots (June 10, 1952)
- Maiden voyage: July 3, 1952, New York to Le Havre and Southampton
- Last voyage: Returned to New York in October 1969 after roughly 400 crossings
She is still the largest ocean liner ever built entirely in the United States.
The Ship That Wouldn’t Burn
One of the things I find most fascinating about the SS United States is how far Gibbs went to make her fireproof.
He had watched ships like the Morro Castle and the Normandie burn, and he was determined that would never happen to his ship. So there was essentially no wood on board. The only wood allowed was in the galley’s butcher blocks and, famously, the grand piano. Even the piano only made the cut after a demonstration in which it was doused with gasoline and set on fire without burning.
Everything else was aluminum, steel, glass and fire-resistant fabrics. The furniture, the fixtures, even the hangers in the closets. Instead of traditional teak, the open decks were covered with a latex-based material. It made her lighter, faster and safer than any liner before her, though some passengers felt she never had quite the warmth of the wood-paneled European ships.
Breaking the Blue Riband
The SS United States left New York on her maiden voyage on July 3, 1952.
She crossed from New York to England in 3 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes, averaging 35.59 knots. That smashed the eastbound record the Queen Mary had held since 1938 by more than 10 hours.
On the way home, she set the westbound record too, at 3 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes, averaging 34.51 knots.
Her captain, Commodore Harry Manning, came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
The Awards and Honors
Here’s what the SS United States earned over the years:
- The Blue Riband (1952): The unofficial but legendary honor for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger liner. She took it in both directions on her maiden voyage, making her the first American ship to hold it in about a century.
- The Hales Trophy (1952): The physical trophy that goes with the Blue Riband was formally presented to the United States Lines in New York. She held it until 1990, when it went to a high-speed catamaran ferry, not an ocean liner.
- National Register of Historic Places (1999): She was listed on the National Register on June 3, 1999, recognizing her as a nationally significant piece of American history.
More than 70 years after her maiden voyage, no passenger ocean liner has ever crossed the Atlantic faster. Smaller high-speed craft eventually beat her times, but in the category she was built to compete in, the SS United States was never beaten. She was also the last ocean liner to hold the Blue Riband.
The Jet Age Signaled the End
For 17 years, the SS United States was the way to cross the Atlantic if you were famous, powerful or simply wanted to arrive in style.
Her passenger lists included Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Walt Disney, Salvador Dalí, Duke Ellington and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had a suite on board that came to be known as the Duck Suite. Bill Clinton also sailed on her in 1968 on his way to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
The problem for the SS United States wasn’t another ship. It was the airplane.
She entered service in 1952, and just six years later jet airliners started crossing the Atlantic in a matter of hours rather than days. Passenger numbers dropped steadily through the 1960s, and her owners tried sending her on cruises to fill the gap. But she was built to be a fast liner, not a cruise ship, and the economics never worked.
In the fall of 1969, after roughly 400 voyages, she returned to Newport News for her annual overhaul. She never sailed with passengers again.
Fifty Years of Waiting
What followed was one of the longest, saddest layups in maritime history.
She was sold to the U.S. Maritime Administration in the early 1970s and sat in Norfolk for years. In 1980 she was sold to a developer with plans to turn her into a time-share cruise ship. That never happened, and in the 1980s her interiors were auctioned off. Pieces of her furniture and artwork are still scattered around the country in private homes, restaurants and museums.
In the 1990s she was towed to Turkey and then Ukraine to have her asbestos removed, and in 1996 she arrived in Philadelphia, where she would spend almost three decades tied up at Pier 82 on the Delaware River. Anyone flying in and out of the Philadelphia International Airport could spot her easily.
In 2003, Norwegian Cruise Line bought her with plans to bring her back into service as a U.S.-flagged cruise ship. Those plans eventually fell apart too, as it was deemed too costly.
In 2011, the SS United States Conservancy bought the ship and spent years trying to raise money and find a developer to turn her into a hotel, museum or mixed-use attraction. They kept her afloat through sheer determination, but the money never came close to what a full restoration would cost.
The end began with a rent dispute. In 2021, the pier owner, Penn Warehousing, doubled her daily dockage fee. That turned into a lawsuit, and in June 2024 a federal judge ordered the ship to leave the pier.
From Philadelphia to the Gulf
In October 2024, Okaloosa County, Florida, bought the SS United States for $1 million with plans to sink her as an artificial reef, a project estimated at about $10 million.
She left Philadelphia under tow on February 19, 2025, and arrived in Mobile, Alabama, on March 3. Over the following months, crews removed fuel, paint, wiring, windows, portholes, furnishings and anything else that could harm the marine environment. They also cut openings throughout the hull so marine life could move in and so she would settle upright on the bottom.
Not everything stayed with the ship. Both of her iconic red, white and blue funnels and her radar mast were removed in August 2025 and are being preserved for a land-based museum, along with other artifacts from the ship.
Preservation groups fought to the very end. The New York City Council passed a resolution urging the federal government to stop the sinking, and a last-minute federal lawsuit from a preservation group was denied by a judge on November 6th.
She left Mobile for the final time on November 9th and arrived at the reef site yesterday.
Once she’s on the bottom, the SS United States will sit in roughly 180 feet of water, with her upper decks expected to be only about 55 to 60 feet below the surface. That puts parts of the wreck within reach of recreational divers, and Okaloosa County is counting on her becoming one of the most famous dive sites in the world. She’ll be about 12 nautical miles from the USS Oriskany, the aircraft carrier that was sunk as a reef off Pensacola in 2006.
Over the coming years, she’ll be covered with coral and sponges and become home to snapper, grouper, amberjack and who knows what else.
A Bittersweet Goodbye
I’ll be honest. I have mixed feelings about all of this.
On one hand, it’s sad. This was the greatest passenger ship this country ever built, a ship that captured what America was in the early 1950s: confident, ambitious and determined to be the best at everything. In a perfect world, she would have been restored and preserved the way the Queen Mary has been in Long Beach.
But we don’t live in a perfect world, and the honest truth is that no one ever came up with the hundreds of millions of dollars it would have taken to save her. After nearly 30 years of watching her rust on the Delaware River, a reef where people can still visit her, and where she’ll support an entire ecosystem, is a far better ending than being cut up for scrap.
The Queen Mary 2 is now the only true ocean liner still in regular service, and with the SS United States gone, the great liners of the 20th century are almost entirely a memory.
So today, at 1 p.m. Central time, raise a glass to the Big U. She was the fastest, the safest and, for a while, the proudest ship on the Atlantic. And no passenger liner ever took that record away from her.
If you’d like to watch, the sinking is scheduled to be livestreamed on TheSSUS.com.
