This rust bucket is the SS United States, a once glorious vessel now moored next to a South Philadelphia shopping mall, where it’s been sitting in decay for 18 years, racking up roughly $60,000 a month in rent. Paint is peeling off its hull. The interior, stripped of previously asbestos-laden innards, is mostly bare. It doesn’t look like it now, but it is possibly the most impressive watercraft ever produced by the United States.

Active from 1952 to 1969, the SS US carried civilians between America and Europe quickly, safely, and comfortably. In the late 1960s, the booming airline industry, equipped with the jumbo Boeing 747, rendered the ocean liner obsolete. After nearly two decades in Philly, the ship has run up a huge tab and the SS United States Conservancy, a group that bought the ship in 2011 and intends to preserve it, is running out of money. If they don’t raise more funds soon, they’ll likely have to cede ownership, at which point it'll likely be sold to the highest-bidding scrap dealer. “She is a very much endangered piece of American history,” says Thomas Basile, an adviser to the Conservancy. “We could be within a month of having to decide her state.”

A Marvelous Design

The history of the SS US dates back to 1916, when William Francis Gibbs, whose naval architecture firm later designed more than half the American armored ships used in World War II, started working on the ship's design. He spent the next 40 years overseeing its completion, up to its 1952 maiden voyage. The U.S. military got involved and financed two thirds of the $78 million ($780 million in 2014) construction costs near the end of the process, when Gibbs pitched the ship as a way to bring hundreds of thousands of soldiers home from Europe.

Except for a few men in uniform moving between overseas posts, the SS US was never converted to a full-scale troop-carrier, but with the threat of the Soviet Union looming in the postwar years, it was good to know there was a way to move 14,000 soldiers over 10,000 miles of ocean without stopping to refuel.

Thanks to Gibbs’ focus on speed and safety, the SS US proved useful for civilian use. The ship is enormous, 990 feet long and 101 feet wide, just skinny enough—by a few feet—to pass through the Panama Canal if necessary. It weighs 53,000 tons, which is actually quite sprightly given its size. That’s thanks to Gibbs’ insistence on using aluminum instead of steel everywhere possible to save weight. He also hated the idea of wood, which risked catching on fire. “Gibbs wanted Steinway to make the pianos out of aluminum,” says Basile. The piano-maker refused, but ended up using fire-proof mahogany instead. The pianos and the butcher blocks were the only wood items on board—at Gibbs' insistence, even the clothes hangers and shuffleboard pucks were made of plastic.

The ship’s blade-like hull allowed it to cut through water efficiently. At the rear, it used four 61,000-pound manganese-bronze propellers, two with four blades and two with five blades. The setup, engineers found, provided better hydrodynamics than other configurations. Inside, the *SS US’*s four high-temperature steam engines could produce just over 240,000 shaft horsepower, meaning they send all that force straight to propellers with no energy lost. That could get the ship to 38.32 knots, or around 44 mph, which it hit on a speed trial.

In July 1952, it crossed the Atlantic in 3 days, 10 hours, and 42 minutes, beating the previous record by 10 hours. Even though it stopped running in 1969 after over 800 transatlantic journeys, it still holds the transatlantic speed record (the Blue Riband award) for the crossing. "It ran like a fine Swiss watch," says Bob Sturm, who was an engineer on board the ship from 1957 to 1959. "It never had a break down in its service life. It was a pleasure to work on it.” The ship drew high-profile passengers like Harry Truman, Rita Hayworth, and John F. Kennedy.

It'd Make a Great Mall

All those superlatives were rendered irrelevant by spectacular advances in aviation, most notably the introduction of the Boeing 747, which cut transatlantic transportation from days to hours. After the SS US left service in 1969, it spent time in various ports, mostly in Virginia. It did go to Turkey and Ukraine, where cheap labor and lax environmental regulations made it easy to remove the asbestos-laden insulation. It’s been sitting in Philadelphia since 1996, and in 2011 the SS United States Conservancy came in. The group bought the ship, and now, with help from only private donors, it has a vision for the future that doesn't involve so much rust and decay.

The group’s executive director is Susan Gibbs, William Gibbs' granddaughter. Her organization’s goal is to keep the ship from being sold for scrap, which means rallying support to move it to a high-traffic area where its roughly 650,000 square feet of on-board space could be converted into a shopping center, casino, restaurant, or a combination of all three—something like what was done to the Queen Mary or the SS Rotterdam, which are permanently moored in Long Beach, California, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands, respectively.

Gibbs estimates it would take about $15 million to get the SS US to the initial stage of refurbishment, which means fixing up decks so it can host venues and retail shops. “We’ve identified a couple of locations in New York that would be great,” she says, “and we are trying to build more political support.” So far, all funding that's kept the ship alive has come from private donors.

In the 18 years it’s been docked on the Delaware River, it has run up quite a bill, and the next few months will be decisive for the fate of the ship. If the Conservancy can’t raise more cash soon, it may have to give up. “The question is going to be, are we going to have enough time for this thing to take off?” Gibbs says. “This month is a now-or-never situation.” The Conservancy is accepting donations and making the rounds in Washington to rally support to preserve a monument to a past era of innovation.

Currently, Homeland Security rules and the business conducted at nearby piers prevent visitors from seeing the once magnificent, still imposing, ship in person. Until it gets moved or scrapped, the best way to see it, the conservancy says, is from the cafeteria at a nearby IKEA.