SS United States
Matthew Christopher, on visiting and photographing The SS United States: Philadelphia’s Abandoned Ocean Liner:
As I looked out of the [SS United States] over the strip malls and parking lots that sprawled out before the ship’s bow, it struck me that maybe as a culture we are losing the capability to incorporate things of such remarkable grandeur into the fabric of our lives. We see something magnificent and instead of feeling that transcendent awe and humility, maybe we view it as a threat to the worth of the generally shabby architectural constructs we pepper our cities with today. Rather than a cause for celebration, things of beauty are merely to be gleefully demolished or to be hacked apart for the base elements they are made of. The real failure is in our own inability to save something like the SS United States, not in its inability to integrate itself into our world. We may now have massive cruise ships serving as seaborne vacation metropolises, but it would be hard to argue that they approach the class or elegance of the passenger liners that preceded them. Maybe as a symbol of who we are, we just don’t deserve the SS United States any more. Maybe we never did. I leave that judgment to you.