I have been to the Queen Mary when the Howard Hughes Spruce Goose was located in the massive dome. Frankly at the time you could take 3 tours. I and my then wife selected the tour allowing you into the Bridge plus part of the Passenger quarters along with the large shopping facilities on the ship. I recall the Luxury car in front of the area of the Bridge but do not recall the make. I suspect it was the English Bentley. We went from bow to stern to get the flavor of all of it. Sadly a lot has gone wrong in Long Beach, CA. I returned later to Long Beach in 1981 but did not get back to the ship. I hope under new owners the ship can survive. I would love to read accounts of posters being on the Queen Mary along with being on the Spruce Goose. I was in the Cockpit of that Airplane.
Long long ago I went on the ship. Fantastic tourist attraction. There are very few places where you can see what these great ships from this era were like. At that time there were no communication systems like we know today, and the ship has different hollow pipes for people to be able to communicate with each other in different parts of the ship.
I visited California in the early nineties because my sister and her family lived there. We took an unguided tour of the Queen Mary and guess who got on the elevator with us? It was none other than Danny Bonaduce and a little girl who was hopefully his daughter. My brother in law said he lives on the Queen Mary (or did at the time).
Any chance it could be converted into low cost housing rentals and or a % of emergency accommodation/shelters?
The last time she was probably taken care of was when Disney ran it a few decades ago. They tried for years to turn it into a more modern venue, including a small theme park on the site, and expanded eating and shopping. But the fights with Long Beach eventually had them scrap that, and instead expand the hotel at their park and eventually create California Adventure. Since then, the ship has largely gone from holding company to holding company. Each largely doing crap for maintenance and just taking what money they could before selling it again. I was last on the ship about 20 years ago, and even then it was in a sad shape. The rust was obvious, as well as other signs of neglect. And with the ever increasing cost of tickets and even more insane prices for rooms (they start at over $800 a night), and it is no wonder that money has been shrinking. As far as turning it into housing, sure. If you want to see it totally destroyed in a few years. There is a reason most shelters are large open spaces like warehouses. Not much for the bums to destroy. Low cost housing and shelters are insanely maintenance intensive, as those that stay in them do not give a damn about any damages they might cause.
My time on the ship was prior to my divorce in 1978. And I lived for most of my time in northern Ca. So that was over 40 years ago. It is a good tour to be on if prices are reasonable.
Prolly not low cost... ships are expensive to maintain even when not being used, and far more so when being used. Like everything else, they were built to have a projected lifetime. Upgrading and maintaining things like plumbing and electrical would be a total nightmare from the standpoint of perpetual habitation, as those things have likely long surpassed their intended lifespan.
Estimates to repair it are now at between $235 million to $289 million. Cheaper to spend that money and fix the old Boeing factory in Long Beach. Or some other long abandoned factory. Heck, even taking the closed K-Mart and Sears buildings would be cheaper than that.
This was more recent than when I was also on the Queen Mary but it was after the movie Titanic first hit the theaters. There is a plaque in the Engine room of the Jeremiah O'Brian that says the ships engine room is what was used in the last movie The Titanic. This was when Leonardo DiCaprio was young.
And it just continues. https://lbpost.com/news/queen-mary-audit-city-auditor-laura-doud-repairs And the longer this goes on, the more it looks like the eventual destination for the ship is the boneyard. Maintenance is still not being done, and it has become a white elephant that I can not see changing any time soon. And short of finding somebody to come in and put up with the meddling of the city I see it just continuing to rust away.
My mother was a passenger on the Queen Mary as an Army nurse enroute to Britain in WWII. I took my dad to see the Queen after she died. It was fun for him to imagine her trip, then go through the British shops on the dock on the way to the Spruce Goose. Its sad that such a wonderful landmark is disappearing.
I actually had a passage in a book I wrote set aboard the ship. It was in 1984, and a young couple went there on a date before the guy was sent to Okinawa for 3 years. And after dinner they remained for a dance in the ballroom. Where they met an older couple. The man was a veteran, who had traveled on the ship 4 times. The first trip to and from England as part of the build-up before Normandy, then returning to the US for convalescence. Then once again to get his new wife and bring her back to the US to live. I included that as an homage to the generation that took the ship to and from war, and many of them then returning on the same ship afterwards. And could not think of a better place for them to have a date before he himself went overseas.
One fun night 22 years ago or so, we had a conference followed by a party on the Queen Mary. Me and a bunch of drunk engineers ignored the warnings, defeated safety systems, and slowly worked our way through areas of the ship where clearly no one had been for a very long time. And of course we got lost. But it was quite fascinating. There were times you could really feel the age of the ship in areas that had not been kept up. At one point we came around a corner and the guy in front screamed. We stood there in shock for a moment as we saw a human skeleton sitting in a chair! It quickly became obvious that we had stumbled into an area used for Halloween tours but it certainly gave us all shock! Not too long after that we found our way back to the top deck. But it was quite a night. We were down there for a very long time. That ship is huge! And it was fascinating. We came out feeling a real sense of history.
