THE MODERN jet-powered passenger plane, a child of the 1950s, has made the ideal of speed on land or at sea largely beside the point. That's why American trains are slower than they were a generation ago, and why the record for a trans-Atlantic crossing by a passenger liner, once a highly contested distinction, has stood unchallenged now for 50 years.

It was in 1952 - a golden half-century ago - that the SS United States pulled away from her pier on the west side of Manhattan, set her course at the Ambrose Lightship standing guard outside New York Harbor, and, three days, 10 hours and 40 minutes later, carried her 1,660 passengers past Bishop's Rock in the English Channel.

No commercial ship has come close since.

The United States was brand new on that trip, and as sleek and as modern as a ship could be. Just six years later she became obsolete, as the first jet from Europe landed at what was then Idlewild Airport in the marshlands of the borough of Queens.

The problem was this: The United States was built for speed, for people who needed to get somewhere, and not for cruising. There was no natural career after the jets came. Cruise ships today are bloated and pokey, as accommodating as a pair of XXXL jeans; the United States was as essential and as elegant as a narrow silk necktie.

Here's what people forget. It's easy to make fun of the 1950s, which gave us Dwight Eisenhower, Howdy Doody and the Edsel (not to mention a sizable chunk of the baby boom generation). But there was another side to that decade: stylish and very cool, trim, unflappable, urbane. It would be tempting to call the United States the Cary Grant of ships - though naturally Cary Grant himself was among those who took passage on her.

A first glimpse: From the back seat of a car, sometime in the 1960s when the United States was still in service, running on inertia; the car heading down the elevated highway along New York's Ocean Liner Row, where one great ship after another was tied up at the piers, the red roundy funnels of the United States, white-striped at the top and then blue-capped, high and visible and streamlined above some lesser vessel from the Swedish American Line.

A second glimpse: In the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, in 1994, after Turkish yards had refused to take on the work of stripping out her asbestos, and finally the partners who had bought her had found Ukrainians willing to do the job (the Ukrainians said they would recycle the asbestos as wallboard); those same funnels, faded, rising above the foul neglect and dereliction of the old Soviet navy base.

A recent glimpse: At Pier 96 in South Philadelphia, stripped of asbestos and engines and interior furnishings (a 20-foot bar and the bar stools that went with it ended up in a restaurant in Nags Head, N.C.), the hull itself the object of one busted restoration plan after another. The funnels, rusty, still catch your eye.

So that's the record-holder, right there in the Delaware River. Not many ships these days even reach the age of 50. And probably not since the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria has any ship held the Trans-Atlantic Blue Ribbon for so long.

There are those who still dream of returning the United States to gainful, or at least useful, employment. It would be ... well, a folly, surely - but wonderful visions die hard.

A nonprofit group wants to have her declared a national monument (over the objections of the current owner, because it would ensure she couldn't be sold for scrap). Go for it: The United States, and the United States, deserve no less.