PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Susan Gibbs needs to find a new parking spot, fast. And not just any parking spot will do.
It needs to be big enough for an ocean liner.
It’s for a ship bigger than the Titanic, one that is nearly as long as the Chrysler Building is tall. A ship so luxurious that it was the first choice of presidents and royalty. A ship so trusted that it once carried the Mona Lisa. A vessel so fast that its mammoth propellers, churning the sea beneath its grand promenades and shipboard orchestras, were a Cold War state secret.
A ship named the United States that Gibbs has come to adore. In fact, she has dedicated her life to saving it.
Gibbs’ grandfather William Francis Gibbs was a famous ship designer, and the United States was his masterwork. But remarkably, she knew almost nothing about that until she was well into adulthood.
“This, I would not have predicted,” she said recently about being responsible for a rusty steamship.
Gibbs, 62, works in Washington at a private foundation where her primary focus is eradicating genital cutting of women. Between that and her advocacy for the ship, she noted, “People must be so confused by my social media presence.”
A few days ago she drove from Washington to Philadelphia, where the United States is docked on the Delaware River. There, she would attend an important meeting of the small nonprofit group she heads, the SS United States Conservancy, which owns the ship. I joined her for the drive.
Along the way she shared her infectious appreciation for the historic vessel, telling stories from the glory days, back in the 1950s and ’60s. She spoke of the sweeping symbolism of such a luxurious, technologically advanced ship carrying the nation’s name and laughed about how Salvador Dalí would travel on the United States accompanied by his pet ocelot.
Yet a shadow hung over our drive. A ship-sized shadow.
The ship is being evicted from its pier in Philadelphia. The conservancy has just a few weeks to find a new home for the United States. This was what the meeting in Philadelphia would be about.
It turns out that one of the things that makes the ship worth saving, its immensity, is what makes it so tough to save. Not only are huge piers in short supply, but there’s not even a master list of where they might be located.
If a new pier can’t be found, there are two options: either scrapping the ship or “reefing” it. Scrapping means the United States gets cut into pieces and melted down. Reefing is when a vessel is intentionally sunk.
So as Gibbs and the conservancy look for a pier, they must also think the unthinkable. Soon they might be forced to send their beloved ship to the bottom of the sea.
Meet the Big U
Gibbs’ grandfather was a giant of 20th century naval architecture. He designed destroyers, minesweepers and other military vessels, including thousands upon thousands of Liberty Ships, as they were known, that helped win World War II. In other words, he helped to defeat the Nazis.
After World War II was won, he turned his focus to his life’s ambition: to build the world’s fastest ocean liner.
The great ships of the 20th century were famously luxurious, but speed was a selling point, too. Before the dawn of the jet age, ocean liners with evocative names like the Mauretania and the Normandie served transoceanic travelers, and faster crossings brought prestige.
The British had the fastest ship of them all, the Queen Mary, but William Francis Gibbs felt America should hold the title, and he took it personally. In an interview at the time he referred to his British rivals as “condescending, supercilious bastards” who were sneaking around trying to learn his ship’s secrets by getting crew members drunk in pubs.
The United States was designed as a luxury liner that could also be converted to an extremely fast troop carrier. (That explains why the propeller designs were a Cold War secret.)
The Big U, as the ship is known, was so fast that, to this day, it still holds a trans-Atlantic speed record that it set in 1952. It spent nearly two decades racing back and forth across the Atlantic between its home port of New York City and European destinations.
Then in 1969, as jet airplanes finally ended the dominance of the ocean liners, the Big U was mothballed. Docked and put under lock and key, it would never again sail the Atlantic under its own power.
A Rediscovered Love Affair
Fast forward a quarter-century, to 1995.
That year, Susan Gibbs’ father died and she inherited a bronze bust of her grandfather, who had died when she was just 5 and whom she never really knew.
“I remember vaguely meeting this kind of scary figure,” she said.
She also inherited boxes and boxes from her father marked “Gibbs memorabilia.” When she started sifting through them, she said, it became clear that it wasn’t just random family stuff, “It was very much centered on one individual.”
She found a Time magazine cover featuring her grandfather. A New Yorker profile. A Fortune article titled “The Love Affair of William Francis Gibbs.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, they profiled my grandparents,’” she said.
But no. The article was about his love affair with a ship.
Then, a few years later, she took her children to a nautical museum. The kids were bored, she said, until her youngest spotted a bronze bust. The same one they had at home.
“I was like, ‘OK, now I want to know where the ship is,’” Gibbs said. “Where’d she go?”
She went online and quickly figured out that it was docked in Philadelphia, where it had been languishing for years. She also discovered a passionate community of people with their own personal connections to the United States. Former crew members, former passengers. Whatever their reasons, they all wanted to save it.
She fell in with them.
The conservancy emerged from this, but its ambitions were never to actually buy the thing. It organized exhibits, collected oral histories, convened reunions and laid plans for its top priority, a museum.
Then in 2009, crisis struck. The ship’s owner at that time, a cruise line, abandoned its plan to return the ship to service and instead put it up for sale. The only interested buyers were scrap companies.
The conservancy’s ship-buying instincts were awakened. “Go-big-or-go-home energy,” Gibbs called it.
It took about a year, but against all odds the group raised millions of dollars, mainly through Philadelphia philanthropist Gerry Lenfest. And then they owned the ship.
“Our legal counsel was like, ‘Ooh, you guys are like the dog that caught the car on this,’” Gibbs said.
A Way to Appreciate America
Our first stop on our drive to Philadelphia: a post office, to check the mail. The conservancy’s mailbox was stuffed that day, including one particularly thick envelope.
It contained a trove of ship ephemera, sent to the conservancy as a gift from a family that had sailed on the United States nearly 70 years ago. Among the items was a dinner menu from their crossing. Kangaroo tail soup. Champagne sherbet. Rollmops in remoulade.
“The menu descriptions don’t disappoint,” Gibbs noted.
The mail was actually pretty typical, she said, a reflection of all the people around the country who love the ship. It contained $1,800 in donations from supporters in Texas, Florida, Ohio and New York, a letter from a Vietnam War veteran inquiring about visiting the ship, and another letter from a man who wrote, “I love the SSUS.”
So why does Gibbs love the ship so much, too?
Sure, her grandfather designed it. But as she dove into its history, she came to understand it as not just a ship, but something more akin to a grand statement of midcentury American optimism and ambition. A gesture to connect people and nations. A message to the world about modernity, movie stars, aspiration.
It’s well worth noting that beyond the speed and luxury, the ship did have other messages to the world, too. Those top-secret propellers? They were the work of a female engineer, an almost unheard-of profession for women at the time. The interiors were also designed by a firm led by women.
Appreciating the ship is “a way to appreciate America,” Gibbs said, “the idealism and the can-do spirit.”
Also, she said, “Not to anthropomorphize the ship too much, but she’s still here.” She paused, then added, “It just feels like there’s a reason.”
The conservancy would like to see the ship permanently moored as part of a waterfront project somewhere: a hotel, a museum, restaurants, bars, public parks, that sort of thing. What real estate people call mixed-use development.
Several years ago, real estate firm RXR came up with just such a business plan and spent a half-decade trying to make it happen. Among other things, the ship’s lifeboats would have been reimagined as capsulelike cabanas, perfect for enjoying a cocktail or even some Champagne sherbet.
The project got so far along, Gibbs said, “It just felt imminent.”
But late last year, RXR and its partner, MCR (the firm known for converting New York’s historic TWA terminal into a boutique hotel), decided to step away. Finding a location had simply proved too difficult.
The pier crisis isn’t the first time the United States has faced a big setback, though this one comes with a hard deadline.
Imagining what might happen if they can’t find a new pier, Gibbs said that if reefing meant the ship might help marine life to thrive, or provide enjoyment for divers, “there’s something poignant about living on in that way,” she said. “But no, that’s not why I spent so much of my life trying to save her.”
A Surprise Twist
During the drive to Philadelphia, when conversation lagged for a moment, Gibbs suddenly said, “All right, so what else have we not covered?” Then she pivoted to something we definitely hadn’t covered.
She told me that while researching her grandfather she also discovered that one of his sisters had been subjected to genital cutting, which today is a main focus of her work. But at the time, it was not.
“I was shocked,” she said.
She learned this only as she dove deeper into understanding her grandfather, interviewing people who had worked for him and seeking out ever more distant relatives. One of those relatives told Gibbs what had happened to her grandfather’s sister, Georgeanna.
Why was this done, more than a century ago? That fact has been lost to time.
However, Georgeanna’s story, echoing across the generations, helped shape the course of Gibbs’ career. “It was an epiphany,” she said, and around that time she began focusing on the practice as a central part of her work.
The discovery “ties things together for me,” Gibbs said. “The two seemingly unrelated lines of work actually are connected in some ways, through my family.”
We finally arrived in Philadelphia and made plans for the next day. Gibbs would be visiting the ship. And there was the meeting about the hunt for a new pier.
With each day, the search was getting more urgent.
Wanted: One Large Pier
The next day, in Philadelphia, a dozen or so conservancy board members and staff got together by video and in person to hear whether they were any closer to finding a way to save the United States.
They gathered in an office decorated with models of the ship, heroic paintings of the ship, and a small sign from the ship warning crew members to not smuggle liquor across international borders.
The man leading the pier search got down to business. “Well, everybody knows what we’ve got, a 990-foot ship,” he said. That kicked off a detailed discussion of pretty much every long-enough pier they’d identified so far.
Bad news: Huge piers are in short supply.
Good news: Offers to help were pouring in from individuals and government officials alike.
More good news: The mayor of a coastal city had reached out to say he’d love to give the ship a home, to capture tourist dollars that otherwise just zoom by on the interstate.
Bad news: Does he have a pier available right now? No.
Good news: A four-star admiral would be visiting the ship. “Good connection to have,” someone noted.
Bad news: They still need a pier right away.
The meeting wrapped up. “We’re going to do this,” Gibbs said, “We’re going to find a pier!”
At the postmeeting meeting, talk turned to the ship itself. The conservancy recently had decided to offer more ship visits to its donors, but ship visits are surprisingly difficult, dangerous even. Because William Francis Gibbs’ masterwork is in rough shape.
To board the United States, you cross a slender gangplank, pass through a rusty hatch surrounded by paint flakes the size of dinner plates, and step into the ship’s belly. There’s a dusty control panel to your right. Portholes thick with spider webs. And deep in the shadows, a tall bullet-shaped object, a piece of one of the once-secret propellers.
And that’s just the first room.
Deeper in the ship, steel wheels are mounted on the wall along dark passageways, their purpose to seal watertight doors if disaster were to strike. Elevator shafts stand half-open.
Taking it all in, one person muttered, “Insane, insane, insane.”
Still, Gibbs sees the positive. She pointed to a lowly porthole and the screws holding it in place, noting that every slot in every screw was perfectly aligned. Imagine that level of care repeated throughout the ship. Every porthole, every deck, every detail.
“My grandfather was so obsessed,” she said, “Like, just off the charts.” In speeches he gave, she said, one of his favorite laugh lines was, “Why just be difficult when you can be impossible?”
I asked, now that she has come to know her grandfather, does she see any of him reflected in herself?
“I’m increasingly seeing a bit of an obsessive quality,” Gibbs said. It’s “kind of reflected in this work on the ship.”
But to be fair, doesn’t everyone have an unexpected interest or fascination in their lives, or maybe even an obsession?
The granddaughter of William Francis Gibbs was inclined to agree. “We all have our ships,” she said.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
