SS Normandie - Legacy

Legacy

Designer Marin-Marie gave an innovative line to Normandie, a silhouette which influenced ocean liners over the decades, including the Queen Mary 2. The ambience of classic transatlantic liners like the Normandie (and her chief rival, the Queen Mary) was the source of inspiration for Disney Cruise Line's matching vessels, the Disney Magic and Disney Wonder.

The SS Normandie also inspired the architecture and design of the Normandie Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The hotel's roof sign is one of the two signs that adorned the top deck of the Normandie but were removed from it during an early refitting. It also said to have inspired the nickname 'The Normandie' given to the International Savings Society Apartments in Shanghai, one of the most fashionable residential buildings in the city's 20s and 30s heyday and home to many stars of China's pre-Communist film industry.

Items from Normandie were sold at a series of auctions after her demise, and many pieces are considered valuable Art Deco treasures today. The rescued items include the ten large dining-room door medallions and fittings, and some of the individual Jean Dupas glass panels that formed the large murals mounted at the four corners of her Grand Salon.

Also surviving are some examples of the 24,000 pieces of crystal, some from the massive Lalique torchières that adorned her Dining Salon. Also extant are some of the room's table silverware, chairs, and gold-plated bronze table bases. Custom-designed suite and cabin furniture as well as original artwork and statues that decorated the ship, or were built for use by the French Line aboard Normandie, also survive today.

A large bronze figural sculpture of a woman named "La Normandie" which was at the foot of the grand stairway into the first class dining salon was found in a New Jersey, USA, scrapyard in 1954 and was purchased for the then new Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. It was first displayed outside in the parterre gardens near the formal pool and later indoors near the then Fontainebleau Hilton's spa. In 2001 the eight-foot-high, 1,000-pound bronze of a French maiden, called La Normandie, was removed from the Miami Beach hotel by its new owner, Celebrity Cruises. The statue will be placed on the company's newest ship, the Celebrity Summit, which began Caribbean cruises from Port Everglades in October 2001.

Pieces from the Normandie occasionally appear on the BBC TV series Antiques Roadshow and also on its American counterpart. A public lounge and promenade was created from some of the panels and furniture from the SS Normandie in the Hilton Chicago. The dining room "Normandie" on the Carnival Cruise ship Carnival Pride was also inspired by this French ocean liner as per the ship's designer Joseph Farcus.