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NY Times: Historic Supership Sinks to the Ocean Floor (Video) – Loose Cannon

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NY Times: Historic Supership Sinks to the Ocean Floor (Video)

SS United States Becomes Artificial Reef off Florida Coast

Nov 12

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Here’s another piece from the New York Times. Loose Cannon shares stories designated as “gifts” from our Times account. This one was first published earlier today. Use the link below to read the full account, wonderfully illustrated with photos and video by Micah Green.

By JESSE PESTA

In its glory days, the S.S. United States was fast, luxurious and all but indestructible. As the ocean liner’s designer, William Francis Gibbs, liked to say, “You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her.”

And he was right, up to a point.

On Wednesday one of the greatest ships to sail the seas made its final journey, 180 feet down to the bottom of the ocean. At 8:59 p.m. Central time, the S.S. United States —a midcentury monument to postwar American technology and ambition—slipped below the waves, opening its next chapter as an artificial reef and diving destination.

But it turned out to be tough to sink the S.S. United States. In fact, it took years of planning and preparation to reach this point. And some fighting. A preservationist group filed a last-minute lawsuit to try to block the effort, though a judge dismissed the suit.

So on Wednesday, hundreds gathered about 22 nautical miles off the coast of Destin, Fla., aboard sailboats, speedboats and yachts to watch one of the most unusual intentional sinkings to ever take place. Rarely is a vessel so big sunk in this way.

Stripped of its signature red-white-and-blue smokestacks—they were removed for a planned museum nearby — the S.S. United States cut a somewhat more low and lean profile than it once did. You could say it looked more like a cigarette boat than an ocean liner, if cigarette boats were as long as three football fields.

Still it was a fitting look, because the ship was the fastest ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

The ship’s designer, Mr. Gibbs, was a giant of 20th-century naval architecture, and the S.S. United States was his magnum opus. Built in the boom years after World War II, it was an ocean liner so fast, its top speed was a Cold War state secret. On its first trans-Atlantic round trip, in July 1952, it set a speed record that still stands today.

The S.S. United States spent most of the 1950s and ’60s ferrying people between New York and Europe, its shipboard orchestras and cocktail lounges entertaining countless travelers — presidents, royalty, immigrants and vacationers. Marilyn Monroe sailed on the ship. Walt Disney. Duke Ellington. Princess Grace. But its most famous passenger was probably the Mona Lisa, in 1963, when the painting visited America.

But as jet travel turned ocean liners into relics, passengers dropped away. In 1969, the ship was mothballed. Until relatively recently, it hadn’t budged from its Philadelphia pier for decades.

For the ship to become a reef, its dark, labyrinthine interiors needed to be made safe for divers. Its huge fuel tanks had to be drained of decades-old goop. And for that to happen, the ship had to be towed halfway around the country, to a shipyard in Mobile, Ala., by a special oceangoing tugboat.

But first, the Coast Guard needed to be persuaded that the ship, which is as long as the Chrysler Building is tall, was safe to move.

The effort to turn the S.S. United States into an artificial reef was led by Alex Fogg, the natural resources chief of Okaloosa County, Fla., which bought the ship in 2024 for $1 million. The county is assembling a menagerie of sunken ships for divers to explore off the coast of Destin on Florida’s panhandle.