The story of the Ship Hotel is one of dreams fulfilled and dreams dashed, of a delightfully preposterous roadside attraction that brought comfort and joy to many before its long, sad decline and spectacular demise.

Brian Butko tells it masterfully in “The Ship Hotel: A Grand View Along the Lincoln Highway” (Stackpole Books, $19.95). Part scrapbook, part family album, part communal memoir, this visually bountiful, right-sized book can be read just about in a single sitting, maybe curled up with a cuppa joe in vintage Ship Hotel china.

Before there was a Ship Hotel there was a Grand View Point, “just one of many scenic spots in the mountains of Pennsylvania where entrepreneurs thought they could sell some pie and cold drinks or pennants and postcards to motorists pulled over to cool their radiators, brakes and tempers,” Mr. Butko writes. “The mountaintop view gave added reason to stop, and soon many stands had lookout towers or telescopes.”

Grand View Point was the name given to a sharp curve 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, 17 miles west of Bedford and a mile east of Bald Knob Summit, at 2,906 feet the highest point on the Lincoln Highway — U.S. Route 30 — in Pennsylvania.

In 1928, Herbert Paulson, a native of the Netherlands, built at the curve the castle-themed Grand View Point Hotel, with rooftop turrets and four floors, three below road level. Three years later, with the help of German-born Albert Sinnhuber as building designer, he enlarged and remodeled it to look like an ocean liner because, an early WPA travel guide reported, the morning mists in the valley reminded him of billowing ocean waves. Mr. Paulson, who made annual or biannual trips to Europe, also had a big love of the sea, Mr. Butko believes.

The Ship’s construction was a suitably quirky feat of engineering, with 18 steel piers sunk 30 feet into the rock and 22 car frames added to the concrete foundation for strength.

Even if drivers didn’t stop at the Ship, its shipside slogan — “SEE 3 STATES and 7 COUNTIES” — sparked discussion in carloads of kids and parents headed east or west. For the record, they’re Bedford, Somerset, Blair, Fulton and Huntingdon in Pennsylvania, Allegany in Maryland and Mineral in West Virginia “but these are debated,” the author reports.

Travelers who did stop, for a meal or an overnight stay, could use one of six telescopes on the Ship’s deck to view the unspoiled landscape.

“Regulars reserved rooms for a couple weeks or more,” Mr. Butko writes. “In that simpler time, it was an all-inclusive attraction.”

For the Paulsons — Herbert had a wife, Mitzi, and three children — the Ship was more than a business; it was home. A longtime Ship enthusiast, Mr. Butko first met Herbert and Mitzi’s granddaughter Clara Gardner in 1989, and she proved to be his best source about life on board. She grew up on the Ship and later worked there for 25 years.

In what seems today like top-notch sitcom or ’30s screwball comedy material, Capt. Paulson carried the maritime theme to the max. The Ship had five levels, including “steerage,” as the mostly female help dubbed their living quarters. Upstairs were the staterooms, some with private baths, and two outdoor decks where dances were held on summer nights under striped canvas awnings — and the musical spell of the Ship’s own nine-man orchestra. Life preservers hung on the deck railings and the walls of the main dining room, where the chairs had anchor-shaped backrests.

Staffers did all the cooking, baking, canning and laundry. Many of the cooks were from coal-mining families, “so it was really an Eastern European kitchen,” Clara’s son Ken Gardner recalled. “You can imagine the cookies and other good stuff” they produced for the holidays.

The Paulson family lived in an upstairs suite near the bow; in later years all the children and their descendants would return for Christmas.

“The best memories are of standing by the windows with eggnog in hand at dusk, as the deer came out onto the snow-covered fields, with the Christmas lights in the homes in the valleys coming on as it approached nightfall, and Bing in the background on the jukebox,” Mr. Gardner recalls in the last chapter, “Sailing Into Sunset.” Brimming with memories and photographs from the Ship’s family and patrons, it’s like a wake for a building that was never properly mourned.

Herbert and Mitzi’s descendants sold the Ship in 1978 to Jack and Mary Loya, who changed its name to Noah’s Ark and opened a petting zoo across the road. The business never thrived, nor did it under subsequent owners, a couple whose restoration efforts were hampered by vandalism and safety codes, Mr. Butko writes.

Efforts by the Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor in the mid-1990s to purchase and convert it to a roadside museum were thwarted. The derelict Ship suffered one ignominy after another until the ultimate one — a fiery consummation in the early morning of Oct. 26, 2001. The cause was never determined.

The Ship Hotel always seemed a little like an apparition, even more so on foggy days. Now that it’s crossed over into the land of memory, Mr. Butko’s well-researched book is a fitting, tangible monument to the history and heyday of the landfaring liner that clung, magically and improbably, to the side of a Western Pennsylvania mountain for 70 years. 

Patricia Lowry: 412-263-1590 or plowry@post-gazette.com.
First Published April 12, 2010 12:00 am