At the time of their construction, the SS Manhattan and her sister ship, SS Washington, also built by New York Shipbuilding Corporation, were the largest liners ever built in the United States, and Manhattan was the first large liner built in the US since 1905. The Manhattan and Washington were two of the few pure liners built by New York ... Read More »
Star of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, Janet Leigh is ready to board the famous SUPER CHIEF and Virginia Leith, star of A KISS BEFORE DYING shows us the all-Pullman train during the 1950s in a promotional film. Even the characters from TV’s MAD MEN may have been aboard the train all through the 1960s. A lot of executives would take the ... Read More »
Juan Fernando Bastos (Caracas, 1958) is a portrait artist whose transit through Venezuela, Bolivia, Washington, Baltimore and finally Los Angeles has nourished a one of a kind aesthetic in visual representation. His work has reached different latitudes and represents the success of transcultural phenomena. He’s considered one of the most in-demand portrait artists in the world. Juan considers some of his most ... Read More »
Besides “crossing the Pond” on Cunard, Elizabeth Taylor sailed to Europe on the French Line’s SS Liberte, cruised to the Mediterranean aboard Cunard’s RMS Caronia and Mauritania. Liz sailed to the Caribbean and South America on the Grace Line’s SS Santa Rosa. She loved ships and the sea. Taylor had sailed a number of times on the RMS Queen Mary with her mother, ... Read More »
Ringo Starr, the former drummer for The Beatles, received the British commonwealth’s highest honor for his contribution to music and charities. The 77-year-old Ringo Starr received a knighthood from Prince William, decades after his lone surviving ex-Beatle Paul McCartney was honored. He used his real name Richard Starkey for the big event, as Prince William thanked him for being such ... Read More »
Love Boat Rejects is a collection of pictures taken by Ian Hughes and his fellow photographers onboard American, Norwegian and Italian cruise-ships throughout the 1990s. Working the decks was Ian’s first job when he left Art College in Merseyside, UK, in 1989. Welcome Aboard… Bon Voyage… First Sitting… Second Sitting… Going Ashore… About the Featured Image Ship’s photographer Muir Vidler understood the pain: ... Read More »
Sailing aboard North German Lloyd’s magnificent SS Bremen from New York to Bermuda for a 7-Day Cruise in the 1930s. Great images and a wonderful home movie video of the cruise. The SS Bremen was a German-built ocean liner constructed for the Norddeutscher Lloyd line (NDL) to work the transatlantic sea route. Bremen was notable for her bulbous bow construction, ... Read More »
As the RMS Titanic was sinking beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, and survivors were thrashing about in the iceberg-clotted waters, what books might they have turned to with which to fashion a homemade life preserver or, in the case of some sturdy Theodore Dreiser novels, an entire raft? It’s hard to determine exactly ... Read More »
The German shipping magnate was responsible for turning Germany into a world leader in ocean travel prior to World War I. With 25,000 employees, Hapag was the largest shipping line in the world for both freight and people (464,000 passengers in 1913). It was Albert Ballin who also invented the pleasure cruise in 1891. The first Pleasure Cruise The world’s ... Read More »
The all-Pullman extra fare train that ran nightly between New York and Chicago. Have you wondered where the much-overused phrase “the red carpet treatment” originated? It all started with the 20th Century Limited. It was a “Magic Carpet” high speed overnight Pullman commute between New York and Chicago as pitched in this Time Magazine advertisement. The “Century” was an express ... Read More »
The album belonged to Louis M Ogden, a New York socialite aboard the RMS Carpathia – the ship that rescued survivors of the Titanic. Carpathia passenger’s scrapbook of the Titanic rescue – including a photo of the Unsinkable Molly Brown’s lifeboat New York socialite Louis M. Ogden’s scrapbook includes several pictures showing the rescue of survivors of the Titanic sinking. Ogden ... Read More »
Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.’s twin interests in baseball and Catalina Island – he bought Catalina in 1919 and gained a controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs in 1921 – dovetailed nicely when he made the decision to have the Cubs train on Catalina starting in 1921. In doing so, he became the first baseball owner to bring a ... Read More »
The Last Word in Luxury Travel With her fabulous art-deco interiors and high crew to passenger ratio, the RMS Caronia very soon began to establish a highly enviable reputation as probably the most luxurious ocean liner afloat at that time. Elizabeth Taylor on Cunard’s RMS Caronia. Reports in all the leading periodicals pointed toward a ship that had set new ... Read More »
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