On a Mission to Save Cruise Ship Décor
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN

MOORPARK, Calif.

THE beige stucco house, on a cul-de-sac here, 45 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, is filled with the remnants of midcentury cruise ships, in piles so large and precarious they make the house feel like an oceangoing attic.

For the last decade, many of the great ships of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s have made their final voyages to Alang, India, where they are sold for scrap. But as they are being picked apart in a ship-breaking operation rarely seen by outsiders, Peter Knego, a former music promoter, has been buying up their furniture and fittings, remnants of an era when cruise lines turned to artists and craftsmen to create striking midcentury interiors.

In 2008, a mural by Enrico Paulucci, rescued by Mr. Knego from the Eugenio C (a 1965 Italian ship), sold for $38,000 at auction. But most of the items he saves are far less valuable. On his Web site, midshipcentury.com, wood and chrome cocktail tables from the Holland America Line’s Standendam are $450; armless chairs from Eugenio C’s cabins are $150; and stairwell light fixtures from the Olympia, of zigzag patterned leather with star-shaped cutouts, are $400.

While the great ships of the 1920s and ’30s — Art Deco ocean liners like the Normandie and the Queen Mary — have many devotees, the ships of the postwar years are far less celebrated.

“I didn’t think this stuff was cool till six or seven years ago, so I understand it takes time for people to catch up,” Mr. Knego said.

Altogether, Mr. Knego said, he has spent about half a million dollars on his seven trips to India, and another $70,000 or so shipping the spoils home to Moorpark. Friends help him unload the 40-foot-long containers and sort the contents in his backyard.

For the midcentury ships Mr. Knego loves, the beginning of the end was 9/11, which led to a decline in tourism that made many of the liners unprofitable. Now the end of the end is approaching. New provisions of the international Safety of Life at Sea (Solas) convention, effective Oct. 1, prohibit wooden construction in overnight passenger ships. That provision, Mr. Knego said, dooms most ships built before 1970, which would require such extensive refurbishment that it’s more economical to scrap them.

Mr. Knego expects several of those ships — including the Mona Lisa (formerly the Kungsholm) — to end up in Alang. After that, he said, “It will just be the ships of the ‘Love Boat’ generation — with cheap, mass-produced details.”

Mr. Knego said that as a child he had various fixations — butterflies and Henry VIII — but that he found his true passion in the eighth grade, when he wrote a paper on the Lusitania. As an adult, he took as many cruises as he could on the midcentury ships.

In 2004, Mr. Knego, now 50, was working as a record promoter when he heard that one of those ships, the Stella Solaris, built in France in 1952, was headed to Alang. “I didn’t want to go,” he said, “but I knew I had to do it.”

Since then, he said, “Every time I recover from one trip, I hear about another ship. It’s been non-stop for the last five years.”

The process, he said, is driven more by the desire to save bits of maritime history than to make money. He supports himself in part by writing articles about cruise ships and in part from sales of a video that documents his first trip to Alang. Alang isn’t Mr. Knego’s idea of a vacation destination. He doesn’t like heat or bugs or heights — all three of which abound during his sojourns.

The cruise lines sell the ships to Alang’s ship-breaking tycoons, who profit by recycling the steel and other materials recovered from the vessels. When the ships arrive in Alang, they are run onto the beaches at high tide, then allowed to sink into the sand, making it possible for workers to clamber aboard.

Human rights groups say those workers are handling asbestos and other hazardous materials with little if any protection. According to the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking, a coalition of advocacy groups, ship breaking as practiced in South Asia “creates unacceptable levels of death, injury, work-related diseases and environmental pollution.”

Mr. Knego’s attitude is that if the ships are going to be destroyed — however that happens — he would like to save as many of their riches as he can. But because the ship breakers would prefer to avoid prying eyes, he said, foreigners are generally unwelcome in Alang. Mr. Knego, who has light brown hair and pale blue eyes, moves around town in the backseat of a car, a Hindi newspaper covering his face.

He gets to the ships by launch, or sometimes simply by wading (being 6-foot-3 helps). Once he identifies the items worth saving, Mr. Knego said, he makes the ship breakers an offer, “based on what I think the market is in India.”

“Then they multiply it by 10, because I’m a Westerner,” he added. “And then we haggle back and forth.”

Mr. Knego and his partner of 22 years, Mike Masino, a cost estimator for an aerospace company, have decorated their house with as much of the cache as possible. The living room is centered on a bar from the Aureol, which was built in Glasgow in 1951. Dining room furniture is from the Aureol, the Ivernia and the Stella Oceanis. A stair with a railing salvaged from the Ivernia leads to the second floor, where the master bedroom contains a mirror from the Empress of Canada and art from the Stella Oceanis by the Italian painter Emanuele Luzzati.

For Mr. Knego, living among the items is a kind of déjà vu. Growing up in the Hollywood Hills in the 1970s, he persuaded his father, an actor who went by Peter Coe, to take him to see the ships when they docked in San Pedro or Long Beach Harbor.

Thanks to brochures from travel agents, he knew the ships’ arrival dates as much as a year in advance, and planned his excursions accordingly.

Once on the ships — in those days, there was no security to keep him off — Mr. Knego would take extensive notes on the décor. Those notes and the accompanying photographs proved handy more than 30 years later. When he hears that a ship is about to be scrapped, Mr. Knego knows exactly what’s onboard; that lets him decide whether to make the trip to India. (He generally stays in Alang, which is 500 miles northwest of Mumbai, for two weeks at a time.)

Along with thousands of brochures sent to the teenage Mr. Knego by the cruise lines, the notes and photos fill more than a dozen filing cabinets. They compete for space in the house with items like a huge painting of New York Harbor by the British artist William Ware for the Olympia. Mr. Knego and Mr. Masino refuse to part with it, even though they don’t have a wall big enough to hold it, which is why it sits on its side in the family room.