1930s

The first of Ritz-Carlton’s Yacht Collection ships hit the water for the first time recently at a shipyard in Vigo, Spain. Cruises don’t begin until February 2020, but reservations are open for one of the newest luxury cruise lines around. They will be newest and finest small cruising vessels afloat. The new ships will be customized, in keeping with the ... 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 North Shore Line’s Electroliners streamline interurban trains operated from the 1940s into the early 1960s. For most street railway and interurban lines the coming of the automobile put an end to an industry that was just a few decades old.  The 1920s and the Great Depression later that decade bankrupted and shutdown many intermediate lines while the strongest companies ... 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 »

Known as the “Queen of Sea,” the Merchants and Miners Transportation Company Steamship Line operated one of the finest fleets of passenger steamers on the Atlantic Coast and ranked foremost as one of America’s top tourist routes. It was said to be the only line plying between Baltimore, Savannah, and Jacksonville. Home movie aboard the Merchants and Miners Trans Co ... Read More »

Have you wondered where the much-overused phrase “the red carpet treatment” originated? It all started with the 20th Century Limited. The train of tycoons and movie stars. The “Century” was an express all-Pullman passenger train operated by the New York Central nightly from New York to Chicago. From 1938 until the last run in 1968, passengers walked down a crimson carpet ... Read More »

Besides the fabulous Italian ocean liner S.S. REX launched in 1931, there was another S.S. REX. The gambling ship off the coast of California in the 1930s and 1940s. The far lesser (but profitable)REX was operated as a gambling ship off Los Angeles by Anthony Cornero. Gary Grant made a movie in the early 1930s based on the gambling boats. ... Read More »

At the time of their construction, the Manhattan and her sister ship, 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 Shipbuilding, which ... Read More »

There were a large variety of cruises out of New York in 1933 celebrating the Labor Day weekend. They were designed to fit every kind of pocketbook, bulging or slim. They were aboard grand liners. CUNARD LINE The Cunarder RMS Aquitania offered a week-end to Nova Scotia, leaving New York 9 p.m. Friday and returning 8 a.m. Tuesday, at a ... Read More »

On April 13, 1962, America’s last night boat service ended as the Old Bay Line’s steamers made there final voyages on the waters of the Chesapeake Bay ending service between Baltimore and Norfolk. Known officially as the Baltimore Steam Packet Company, which had come to be known as the Old Bay Line, it had been doing its thing since the ... Read More »

Known as the “Queen of Sea,” the Merchants and Miners Transportation Company Steamship Line operated one of the finest fleets of passenger steamers on the Atlantic Coast and ranked foremost as one of America’s top tourist routes. It was said to be the only line plying between Baltimore, Savannah, and Jacksonville. Aboard the Merchants and Miners Trans Co SS NANTUCKET ... Read More »

In December 1934, the refurbished Earl Carroll Theatre located on the south-east corner of 7th Ave and 50th Street, New York City, opened as the French Casino. This glittering supper club was described by Fortune magazine as ‘a vast scarlet and silver restaurant which, in terraced rows of tables, seats fifteen hundred people without any crowding.’ For a short three ... Read More »

The Paramount Theatre opened in January 1923 as Grauman’s Metropolitan Theatre. It was the second largest movie palace in California, San Francisco’s fabulous Fox Theatre was the first. Both were demolished in the 1960s. Elvis Presley appeared in person at the Paramount in the 1950s. Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood were featured on the gigantic screen in “The Girl I ... Read More »

Otto August Kuhler was an American designer, one of the best known industrial designers of the American railroads. His design for the Leigh Valley locomotive is spectacular when it comes to streamlining a locomotive. The 1930s and 1940s were unique when it came to modernizing trains. According to Trains magazine, he stream-styled more locomotives and railroad cars than Cret, Dreyfuss, ... Read More »

The great German liner Bremen, which ran a British blockade, ended her career in a scrap yard. After docking in New York on August 28, 1939, only four days before the outbreak of World War II, Captain Adolf Ahrens of Germany’s North German Lloyd shipping line was faced with a decision. The independent-minded skipper could disobey orders again by allowing ... Read More »