I don’t mean to say there are or should be doomed.  I don’t mean that at all.  It’s just uncanny that along a less than 10-mile strip,  at least four such huge icons lie as if in an intensive care unit, some in a coma and others tending toward comatose.  Similarly,  river bank greenery half obscures some of the slipways where state-of-the-art ships splashed out of  such legendary yards as Delaware River Iron Shipbuilding, Merchant Shipbuilding, Sun Shipbuilding, American International Shipbuilding, New York Shipbuilding (and who knows which others I left out.)

The SS United States hangs in the balance.  If you’re in Philly July 1, watch the stacks illuminate.  Click here for a tour into the ship’s bowels.

This glimmer of hope JUST in from today’s Wall Street Journal.

I could see three props on deck.

Click here for a vintage cutaway.  Click here for statistics of all sorts including how fast she could travel in reverse!

Answer:  25 kts in reverse:  that’s faster than Titanic forward.   It’s strange to think this vessel’s service life was a mere 17 years, which ended 41 years ago.

Take a tour here.

A few miles south of SS United States is CV-67, John F. Kennedy, whose 37-year career spanned conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq.

Click here for a foto archive . . . and more.

Might the carrier go to Rhode Island?

And CV-59, a 39-year veteran just back from Rhode Island, might she be reefed?

And then, there’s C-6 Olympia, not hauled since World War 2, located right across the river from BB-62.

Here’s Olympia‘s Facebook page.  Whitherward?

Tour the vessel–including views of the five-inch guns–here.

Here’s a 1997 maintenance report, and

slightly different analysis from 2000.

Doomed?  Hope?  Who has deep pockets these days?  Please forward this post to lots of friends.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Unrelated:  Follow the rowers that left the sixth boro (aka New York harbor) for the UK  June 17.