Not necessarily.

As we've seen throughout all kinds of preservation, celebrity/superlative/sex/etc. sells.

People will contribute to, and elbow others out of the way to see and be a part of, projects with more sizzle, flash, and glamor than they will a more mundane and "everyday" project. This is why you will see Corvette shows but not Ford Escort or Chevy Chevette or AMC Gremlin shows. (VW shows are "cult gatherings.") This is why more people are contributing to a PRR T1 replication than a PRR G5 restoration. This is why UP's Big Boy is still drawing people on a scale on par with the "once in a lifetime" American Freedom Train.

And it is NOT given or even the least bit true that dollars squandered on, say, the ultimately futile efforts on the SS United States would instead have gone to, say, the Queen Mary, the USS Olympia, the USF Constitution or Constellation, the USS Intrepid, or even "The Love Boat" (Pacific Princess, scrapped in Turkey 2013-14). Or pick some other boat/maritime project.

Raising funding for preservation, either via donations or grants, is always a salesmanship challenge. You're not just competing against other rail preservation projects, or even history projects. You're competing against everything from the local art museum to "starving children in Africa" to cute animals at the animal shelter or zoo to schools to homeless shelters to a case of beer or chocolate that looks tasty.

To succeed, you MUST strive to show the worthiness and potential success of your proposed project, And the various efforts to save this ship have repeatedly failed for decades now, in spite of all the "sex" and glamor it had. If it had been a completely ordinary sister cruise ship to "the Love Boat"--a class of ships now considered too small for the cruise industry in 2024--it too would have been scrapped years ago.

USS Olympia (C-6) is the third historic ship berthed in the Port of Philadelphia. She is at Penns Landing along the Delaware River in Philadelphia. This puts her across the river from USS New Jersey (BB-62) in Camden NJ, and a few miles upstream of SS United States at Pier 82S, Philadelphia.

Phil Mulligan

https://www.phillyseaport.org/cruiser-olympia/

You could almost build a new one with that.

Or ensure the Olympia's future.

Or have kept that destroyer that sank afloat.

I know, I know, it's not one's job to tell people what to do with their money, but we can lament seeing it misspent tilting at windmills.

They might be giants.

At least it won't see Alang the way the France/Norway did. And even at the bottom of the Atlantic it may be no worse preserved than certain locomotives that used to be in Northumberland...

Lol, great... I can see it now: Facebook in 2039: "Raise it and run it on the mainline"

Amen, yet:
1) We are created to be tilters, it is a feature and not a bug in being human.
2) Only hindsight is 20/20; from the front end we can't distinguish which are the
windmills.
3) There is value in learning to tilt and training tilters, windmill or not, even if the
price is high.

There are numbers attached to what I was certain were windmills, 4449, 765, 4014 and so on.

Timothy, riding towards today's tilting

The metaphor of tilting at windmills, in Cervantes, was a misguided attempt to achieve something objectively impossible -- this is not a matter of "if the windmill didn't fall over, you weren't pushing hard enough".

Sometimes the pockets aren't deep enough, and sometimes even enormous sums aren't enough to get things safely done in the long run -- I could quote Galbraith here, but it would make the wrong point. There are no 'last chapters' in preservation, but there certainly are with actual scrapping.

I'm really not sure what to say...

https://gothamist.com/news/new-yorkers-seek-to-scuttle-plans-to-sink-historic-ocean-liner-in-florida

"He envisioned the ship as a “floating ecosystem” revolving around sustainability."

???????

PC

Like moving a poorly maintained park engine from one park to another without the resources to maintain it.

He already has one rusting hulk of a ship at his pier..

The SSUS is mentioned in this undated summary of a case study for Gowanus Bay Terminal. There is a link to the full study at the end of the summary.

The owner has two ships stored on site. The MV Yankee, a former Block Island ferry, and MV Loujaine, a bulk carrier currently used for storage. The Loujaine has been tied up and idle since 1996.


~Wesley

Yankee has been at Mays in Staten Island for a few years now.

t's a shorter tow to Brooklyn than Mobile; he should go to the Floridians with a check. Meanwhile the parking fees are adding up.

Needless to say, the ship is still moored at Pier 82S where she's been for the last 30 years or so.

Phil Mulligan