Snapshots of a Ghost Ship

Jonathan Haeber (AKA Tunnelbug) Flickr-posted this amazing set of pictures he took on board the SS Oceanic Independence, a steam-driven luxury cruise ship which has been abandoned for years and sitting at a pier in San Francisco. The ship launched in 1951, and in some of the pictures you can see old 50's telephones in the turbine room ("Hear Here!"), and crew-drawn scrawls from sometime during the fifty years of the ship's life.  It has been host to two presidents (Truman and Reagan), the Saudi king and Lucille Ball.


The Presidential Suite

A ship is like a city in itself, prepared to account for the needs of hundreds of people for days or weeks. There is an inherent fascination for me in seeing the grease-framed phones in the engine rooms, the scrawls of grafitti from decades ago, the tunnels and cramped nooks that lead off into darkness, even the "Aloha" greeting booth still glittering through the dust, and the AA manual in the conference room. The ship is a tiny city that must develop its own history, its own smells and groove-worn memories. There is a strange hopefulness to cruise ships generally; they are designed to be familiar enough for people to feel comfortable, but unfamiliar enough offer a sort of modest utopia--a work-free space where the workers themselves are literally hidden below-decks. I wonder how similar this is to our society, if perhaps the gaudy focus were given free ideological reign. The time-frame of this ship in particular is fascinating-1951-2001, from the end of WW2 to the beginning of the war on terrorism, a veritable bridge of plastic lei's, rum margarita's, sea-gazing and AA meetings over the cold war, over rock n' roll.

I enjoyed looking at all of Haeber's industrial-set pictures on Flickr. Amazing!



(From the Telestar article.)