Press: The SS United States has a sink date. It’s the hottest ticket along the Florida panhandle

by Ximena Conde for The Philadelphia Inquirer

Published Nov. 2, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET

Read the entire article on The Philadelphia Inquirer's website.

Excerpt: "Lanier had never heard of the SS United States before she started volunteering aboard a different ship at Penn’s Landing and subsequently creating artwork of the rusty ships there. People who saw her art kept pointing her to “the biggest and rustiest one,” she remembers.

Lanier has crafted a collection of oil paintings of the less publicly accessible parts of the 990-foot vessel over the last four years. She even got to tour the gutted ocean liner three times before it was bought by Okaloosa County.

The trip and viewing will be a networking opportunity to sell her art and a bittersweet goodbye for Lanier.

“I have kind of come to terms with it over time because I think it would have been nice if it was feasible to repurpose her as a ship that people could actually visit and use in an educational capacity, but that it was logistically and cost-wise not realistic,” she said.

Read the entire article on The Philadelphia Inquirer's website.

Learn more about Brooke Lanier's paintings of the SS United States and her relationship with the ship.