The last steamship is parked at its old Muskegon dock

There is a steamship tied up on the Muskegon waterfront that is older than almost everything around it, and it is the last of its kind. The SS Milwaukee Clipper is the oldest United States passenger steamship still floating on the Great Lakes — a five-deck white liner with a gleaming streamlined nose, sitting quietly at the very dock she used to leave from on her run across Lake Michigan.

She started life as something plainer. She was built in 1904 as the SS Juniata, a steamer with wooden cabins. A fire-safety crackdown sent her to the Manitowoc shipyard in 1940. The yard stripped her down to the steel hull and rebuilt her as a sleek, modern liner. Renamed the Milwaukee Clipper, she went back to work in 1941. For 29 summers she ran between Muskegon and Milwaukee, six hours each way. She could carry up to 900 passengers and 120 cars per trip, and people called her the “Queen of the Great Lakes.”

A crossing on the Clipper was its own little resort. She had air-conditioned staterooms, a movie theater, a dance floor with a live band, a soda fountain, and a children’s playroom. It was a small floating city steaming over open water, with cars tucked away in her belly. For decades she was the elegant face of the Grand Trunk railroad’s Muskegon-to-Milwaukee ferry trade, until the highways and the airlines killed it off.

She was laid up in 1970 and wandered for years. In 1998 she came home to Muskegon, back to the old Grand Trunk dock she had sailed from. The federal government named her a National Historic Landmark in 1989, and volunteers have been patching and polishing her ever since. Walk her decks today and the band is gone, but the dance floor is still there, waiting on a crossing that is not coming.