Photograph by Paul Piaget, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
The SS Admiral was built in 1907 as the Albatross, Louisiana & Mississippi Valley Transfer Co.’s four-boiler steamboat; it transported railroad cars. Captain Joe Streckfus bought it in 1937, hiring Maizie Krebs, a Famous-Barr fashion illustrator, to redesign it. Streckfus Steamers spent a million dollars making it over. Workers tore out the wooden decks, wrapped the boat in a Streamline Moderne skin (the hull was already steel), and made it so aerodynamic, it looked like a giant silver cake gliding up the river. It had five decks (two with a wild luxury: air conditioning!) and a ballroom with a floating dance floor, set with pillars ringed by pink and blue neon. During the day, you might see nuns in full habits sitting in the deck chairs; at night, it was guys with pomaded hair and cigarettes and girls dressed in polka dots. Since the boat held almost 5,000 people, it had 18 bathrooms, including ladies’ powder rooms. The glamour of this one woos you; who wouldn’t want to apply lipstick in the reflection of a mirrored quarter note? But these women couldn’t admit they peed; they went to powder their nose. The woman in the chair, with her faraway eyes, was on the boat to hand towels and perfume to white women, and was never allowed to board the Admiral in a dotted Swiss dress, with a date, to go dancing. When St. Louis outlawed segregation in 1961, Streckfus sued, hoping to block the law, at least in his company’s case. In the end, the boat lived up to its original name. Perpetually in debt as a casino, its Deco fixtures stripped and its corroded hull making it dangerous to move, it sat, moored, waiting to be saved. Its size alone made it a tough sell, and last November, it was put on eBay for $1.5 million, just a shade more than Streckfus spent 70 years ago. No one bought it, so this spring St. Louis Marine towed it up to the North Riverfront to Cash’s Scrap Metal & Iron. The newspaper interviewed couples who’d wooed on the Admiral’s decks in the ’50s; they stood on the bank, holding hands nostalgically, oblivious that others might not be so sad.
