How Philly reacted to the SS United States when it arrived in town

The SS United States finally left Philadelphia.

Its journey to becoming a diving destination as an artificial reef in the Florida Panhandle began Wednesday as tugboats began towing the ship down the Delaware River.

After a journey to Mobile, Ala., it will undergo environmental remediation efforts before taking what will be its final voyage ahead of its planned sinking down south. Officials in Okaloosa County, Fla., the SS United States’ newest owners, hope to use the ship to create the world’s largest artificial reef, and construct a land-based museum honoring its history.

And so, the SS United States’ time in Philadelphia will be followed by a watery grave, after an almost three-decade layup in the city that saw more than $40 million poured into ill-fated resuscitation efforts.

But for decades, the ship has been something of a contentious figure on the Delaware River waterfront. Many Philadelphians have long viewed it as a great adornment for the city, owing to the ship’s fantastic past and potential for future rehabilitation. Others simply saw as an eyesore.

That difference in opinion has been present since the day the ship arrived in Philadelphia in July 1996. Here is how The Inquirer and Daily News covered the city’s reaction to the arrival of the SS United States:

Even before it arrived in Philadelphia, the SS United States was ruffling the feathers of local officials — or, at least, one of its owners was.

The ship came to Philly by way of Turkey thanks to Marmara Marine, which was headed by New Jersey-based developer Edward Cantor and Commodore Cruise Lines chief executive Fred A. Mayer. The company hoped to begin rehabilitating the SS United States, which by then had been stripped of its furnishings, at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard with about $20 million in loans and grants from the city and state.

Negotiations, however, were “not going well,” according to a July 1996 Inquirer report. Cantor had reportedly been pressuring the city with deadlines that turned out to be bluffs, and was unwilling to comply with redevelopment procedures imposed by the Navy, sources at the time said.

Cantor and city officials hadn’t seen eye-to-eye from the outset, The Inquirer reported. Then-Mayor Ed Rendell even passed on meeting with Cantor, sending his chief of staff instead — a move that further irritated Cantor.

Still, on July 24, 1996, the SS United States pulled into Philadelphia’s Packer Avenue Marine Terminal. But officials’ perception of the project didn’t improve.

Two months after the SS United States arrived, city officials expressed concern that the dilapidated ship could be “dumped” here if financing for its rehabilitation didn’t come through, the Daily News reported in August 1996. It could, one unnamed official said, “very easily become the largest abandoned vehicle in the city.”

“If the group can’t get financing, we’re stuck with it,” another unidentified city official said at the time. “I’ve seen a lot of smaller vessels laid up for years.”

Following the ship’s arrival, there had been some talk of converting it into a floating casino and permanently docking it on the Delaware River, but the city reportedly had no interest in that idea. Then-City Councilmember Jim Kenney told the Daily News that effort might be “a pie in the sky.”

But it wasn’t just city officials who weren’t enthused with the ship’s presence. Even the Daily News wanted it gone.

“If the plan is impractical and the ship will just continue to rust,” the People Paper’s editorial board wrote in August 1996, “turn it around (or whatever the nautical term is) and ship it back to Turkey.”

As officials clashed with Marmara Marine, other nautical enthusiasts expressed disappointment with the ship’s shape. Among them was Leroy J. Alexanderson, a former captain of the SS United States, who told the Daily News that seeing the ship in such a rundown state was “a sad ending.”

“You can’t know a ship the way I did and not have feelings for her,” Alexanderson, who had spent 14 years aboard the SS United States, told the Daily News in 1996. " She was my home … She was my life.”

Alexanderson, who was 86 at the time, added that even the idea of turning the ship into a casino or hotel didn’t sit right with him. There was, he said, “no dignity in something like that.”

“She didn’t run long enough. She had a lot of years in her left,” Alexanderson said. In total, the ship’s life span was 17 years, running from 1952 to 1969.

Mike Jacobs, another sailor who had become enamored with the SS United States, meanwhile, lamented what then seemed to be the ship’s ultimate fate.

“Soon we might never see her again,” Jacobs told the Daily News in August 1996. “Except maybe a couple years from now as razor blades.”

Months after the ship arrived in Philadelphia, negotiations for Marmara Marine’s rehab plan stalled By October 1996, then-deputy mayor for communications Kevin Feeley told the Daily News, there was “literally nothing happening” with the ship.

Marmara Marine was estimating the total cost of renovation to be $200 million, and had been seeking months of free docking at the Navy Yard as it attempted to secure financing. The company, Feeley said, had failed to provide a detailed plan.

The Pennsylvania Regional Port Authority, meanwhile, had had enough, and wanted the SS United States gone, spokesperson Bill McLaughlin said.

“Under no circumstances will the Pennsylvania Regional Port Authority let itself become liable for the disposition of the SS United States,” McLaughlin told the Daily News.

By October 1997, the ship yard rehab plan was officially dead, with Cantor blaming the city, claiming that his company “got no follow-up” on the effort. But public interest remained.

“I’ve received dozens of phone calls from people all over the United States,” McLaughlin told the Daily News in 1997. “They want to know what happened to her.”

As it turned out, the answer to that was “not much.” As the Daily News wrote in November 1998, more than two years after the ship’s arrival in Philadelphia, the SS United States remained little more than “a depressing sight sitting in a South Philadelphia dock.”

In 2000, the Daily News doubled down on its criticism, writing in a then-controversial op-ed that the ship was the “mother of all abandoned vehicles.” Cantor, the paper added, had essentially towed “a rusting, ugly, broken-down car” into the city’s driveway, and refused to remove it until Philly paid the repair bill.

Philadelphia, the paper suggested, ought to load all of its abandoned cars into the ship, sinking it under their weight, and clearing the South Philly shoreline of its rusting hull, and city streets of car clutter.

“Voila!” the Daily News wrote. “Everyone wins.”

Many readers didn’t agree.

“What’s next on your list of cleanup projects — the Liberty Bell?” one reader wrote. Another chastised the paper for lacking a sense of history. And a third, this one from Kansas, wrote in to say that they would “consider it an honor to live within sight of this magnificent ship.”

The Daily News walked back its abandoned car analogy a month later, rechristening the ship as “a trophy daughter” to an absentee father.

“She should not be sitting rotting, rusting and idle in our backyard,” the paper wrote. “She should be under the care of someone who will give her productive life.”