Every time I look at a picture or model of her I find myself thinking, "are those stacks too big, or not?" My considered opinion is that they're right on the razor's edge of being out of scale with the rest of the ship - which, I suspect, is just about what old William Francis intended.
The earlier, smaller America may have been, in that respect, a better looking ship. One of the older members of the museum staff had seen some of the original plans for her; she apparently was originally supposed to have one stack. He thought she actually would have looked better that way; I'm not so sure.
The very first time I saw the U.S. was in, I think, 1966, when I was a freshman in high school. My parents and I were in New York on a vacation trip. We were taking a cab ride somewhere or other; the cab turned a corner down near the waterfront and there she was, in all her glory. The cab driver told us that she'd missed a sailing date (she was still on the North Atlantic run) because part of the crew was on strike. I didn't know it then, but that was a foreshadowing of what was to come.
Subfixer's right about the spartan, navalized appearance of her interior spaces. Part of it was due to fifties kitsch, though. Highly simplified, plasticized furniture and decorations were supposed to be high-tech in those days. We briefly toyed with the idea of gathering up the entire contents of a passenger cabin and reassembling it at the museum, alongside a similar exhibit representing a cabin from a liner of an earlier period. (There was enough stuff from the old Leviathan, ex-Imperator, knocking around Tidewater that we figured we could just about reconstruct one of her cabins.) I guess nothing ever came of that idea.
When the U.S. was languishing at Norfolk (and later at Newport News) the museum got quite a few phone calls and letters urging us to acquire her (nobody suggested where we were to get the money), restore her, and tie her up in the James River near the museum building. Such people of course had no idea how utterly impractical such a scheme was. One of the big reasons for the decline of the great liners was the expense of paying the huge numbers of people necessary to maintain them. Even with no passengers on board, I suspect it would take literally hundreds of full-time employees to keep a ship like that presentable.
Lots of enthusiasts get upset about the way the Queen Mary has been treated. I'm out of date about this one; the last time I saw her was in 1984, when she was at Long Beach, functioning as a combination museum ship and luxury hotel. I just checked her website ( http://www.queenmary.com/ ). It looks like, though (if I remember right) she's been moved someplace else and brought back (weren't the Disney people talking about buying her for a while?), she's operated about like she was then. [Later edit: here's a Wikipedia article that straightens out the Disney connection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.M.S._QUEEN_MARY .]I'm a little less critical of the approach her owners have taken than some people are - for two reasons. In the first place, for such a ship to serve as a hotel is pretty consistent with her original purpose. (She was, after all, built to make money.) Second, it's hard for me to imagine that, in this day and age, there's any other practical means of preserving a great ocean liner.
I do hope something good happens to the United States, though I can't be optimistic. People have thought she was on the verge of being turned into razor blades for at least thirty years now (i.e., more than half of her existence). The most encouraging part of the story seems to be the fact that she's still there. Until the razor blade manufacturers actually take their first cut, we can at least hope. If they made her into a hotel and tied her up somewhere on the New York waterfront, I'd pay a fair amount of money to spend a few nights on board her.