Virtually every inch of wall space and nearly all of the vintage furniture and artwork in Peter Knego’s two-story home were salvaged over the past 19 years from the ship-breaking yards of Alang, India.

When you enter the Oceanside home of global maritime historian Peter Knego, you don’t step inside. You step aboard.

Virtually every inch of wall space and nearly all of the vintage furniture, doors, staircase rails and balusters, light fixtures, bar, bathroom vanities and artwork in Knego’s two-story home were salvaged over the past 20 years from the ship-breaking yards of Alang, India, where old ocean liners go to die.

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For nearly 50 years, Knego has chronicled in slides, photos, news articles and films the history and unfortunate destruction of the once-glorious midcentury ocean liners from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. In his opinion, no feat of human engineering has ever competed with the ingenuity and majesty of these long-departed luxury cruise ships like the Empress of Britain, the Stella Solaris, the Augustus and the Regal Empress.

Not only does Knego relish sharing his knowledge of these ships, he also chronicles their dismantling, and has made it his mission to rescue whatever artwork, furniture and fittings he can from the ships that would otherwise be lost.

“It’s devastating to watch them being destroyed,” said Knego, 61. “It’s like if you love the Empire State Building and you have to watch it being demolished. A midcentury ocean liner was the size of the Chrysler building, but imagine the Chrysler building on its side traveling 35 miles an hour at sea. They were masterpieces of engineering and design.”

Anne Kalosh, senior associate editor of the industry publication Seatrade Cruise Review, describes Knego as “one of the foremost ocean-liner historians” in the world. She also said that nobody in the industry is as committed to preservation, even at the cost of his own personal safety, as Knego.

“He feels so committed to preserving those relics and the art and keeping them alive for future generations, that he is going there at great personal peril,” Kalosh said. “Others may purchase items to preserve them at auctions and so forth, but I don’t know anyone else who goes to the place where the ships are being scrapped to save items, as Peter does.”

Knego grew up in Hollywood, the son of ‘40s-'50s film actor Peter Coe and fashion model Rosalee Calvert. As a boy, he collected butterflies, coins and stamps and was obsessed with American history and bridge-building. When he was in 8th grade in 1973, a teacher assigned him a paper to write on the RMS Lusitania, the British ocean liner sunk by a German submarine in 1915 with nearly 2,000 passengers onboard.

While studying the ill-fated ship, Knego said he became increasingly fascinated with all of the luxury ships that plied the Atlantic waters, and in 1974 he began visiting and documenting in slides, and later photographs and video, all of the cruise ships that docked in Long Beach harbor. In the decades that followed, he would amass more than 1 million slides and photographs and more than 1,000 hours of videotape, which he keeps in his office at home and shares on his YouTube channel Peter Knego’s MidshipCinema and his website midcentury.com.

“I don’t get why more people aren’t into ships,” he said. “I guess I like things that are off the beaten track and undersung.”

After high school, Knego studied theater at UC Los Angeles with the idea of becoming a costume or scenic designer. Instead he fell in love with the music of the Sparks, an influential L.A. electronic pop duo, and became their record promoter — as well as a promoter for numerous bands that followed in the Sparks’ footsteps, like the Pet Shop Boys and Siouxsie and the Banshees — from 1986 to 2006. Knego is among those interviewed about the band in the 2021 Netflix documentary “The Sparks Brothers.”

Around 1998, Knego said he grew tired of reading newspaper and magazine reviews of cruise ships because the writers rarely had a grasp of nautical terms or maritime history, so he embarked on a new career as a cruise travel writer. Over the years he has written extensively for Travel Weekly, USA Today, Porthole, TravelAgeWest, Ships Monthly in the U.K. and the now-defunct magazines MaritimeMatters and Cruise Travel.

As a cruise writer, Knego said he prefers writing about the smaller ships that travel to more remote places than today’s enormous floating cities because he liked the intimacy of the old ships and their beautiful and unique interior craftsmanship.

Most cruise ships of the 20th century were only built to last 20 or 30 years, but during hard economic times, Knego said cruise lines sent many more ships to scrapyards to avoid the cost of maintenance and fuel. There was a great cull of ships during the energy crisis in the 1970s, then again after the 9/11 attacks and during the Great Recession and the pandemic.

Many of these ships end up in Alang, a 10-mile stretch of beach in Western India known as the world’s largest ship graveyard. Workers toil for $2 day in squalid conditions among oil fumes, asbestos fibers and monsoon conditions to break the ships down into steel plates that are melted and recycled into rebar, tin cans and other materials.

Knego is among a small group of historians who rescue and preserve the contents of ships, but the only one who has recorded hundreds of hours of footage of the breakdown process for his YouTube channel and website.

During his nine trips to Alang from 2003 to 2014, Knego filled a dozen 40-foot containers and one 20-foot container with items from dying ships. Many of the contents of these containers have been sold through his website to other collectors and many have been given away.

In April, Kalosh wrote about how Knego donated several historic items from long-departed Carnival cruise ships for a retro bar that Carnival Cruise Line is installing on its latest ship to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. Knego has also donated several chairs from the 1955-era Empress of Britain to the Aurora Restoration Project. Ex-software designer Chris Willson of Stockton bought a 1953 German ocean-liner on Craigslist a few years ago, renamed it the Aurora and is now leading an all-volunteer effort to restore the ship to become a floating hotel.

Some of the items Knego has sold over the years have gone for thousands of dollars, but the market is fickle and he hasn’t been able to import any containers since the pandemic began. A little over eight years ago, Knego and his husband, Mike Masino, moved from the Ventura County city of Moorpark to Oceanside because Masino took a job in San Diego. There aren’t as many collectors or interior designers in San Diego County who are interested in these midcentury goods, so instead, many of these items are in storage, and Knego’s favorite finds have become permanent fixtures in their home.

The very first piece Knego salvaged and installed in their home is a walnut tourist-class cocktail bar from the 1951 British liner Aureol. Now fully restored after a rough crossing on a container ship in 2003, it’s the first thing visitors see when they walk in Knego and Masino’s front door, which is a vintage wooden ship door with curved edges and a drop-down porthole.

Knego’s favorite ocean liners are from the midcentury-era peak in the 1950s and ‘60s, particularly those vessels made by Swedish and Italian cruise lines. They employed their nation’s most-famous artisans to fill the ships with unique paintings, sculptures, marquetry, custom furniture and handicrafts that reflected their native cultures.

Knego’s favorite ship-craft designer is Italian artist Emanuele Luzzatti, who died in 2007. Over the years, Knego has decorated his house with numerous Luzzatti melamine paintings, sculptures and hammered metal panels salvaged from ships including the 1957-era Ausonia, the 1959 Victoria and 1965 Stella Oceanis.

One of the largest art pieces in their home is “Fireball in Space,” salvaged from the 1969 ship SS Hamburg (later acquired by the Soviet Union and renamed the Maxim Gorkiy), which was where President George Bush Sr. and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev held their floating Malta Summit in 1989.

The furniture in the TV room and a mermaid statue on the pool deck were salvaged in 2015 from the Island Princess, one of two ships used as a backdrop for the 1970s-era “Love Boat” TV series. Also on the back patio are two pre-Colombian-style Murano glass mosaics by American artist Austin M. Purves, salvaged from the American ship Santa Rosa.

There are hand-carved wood panels, doors and artwork made from mahogany, maple, rosewood, makore and zebrano woods, which are especially rare, as new international maritime fire codes banned the use of real wood on all ships after 2010.

There’s an Egyptian hunting scene painting by Italian artist Giovanni Majoli from the 1957 Ausonia. And the staircase railing was created from balusters from the 1955 Ivernia and 1961 Empress of Canada.

Upstairs, there’s a miniature ship museum, with more than 150 tiny 1:1250-scale models of ships that plied the Atlantic Ocean from the late 1880s to the 1970s, including the ship that started it all for Knego, the Lusitania. He has been collecting the small models for decades.

The house is also chockablock with larger model ships. The most prized of these is Knego’s model of the New Amsterdam, which is his favorite of all the ocean liners ever made. It was scrapped in 1974, so he never had the chance to see it in person.

“The New Amsterdam was built in 1938. It had two funnels, a beautiful bow and gorgeous superstructure and was built at the height of the art deco period,” he said. “If there is an afterlife, I hope when I get there I can walk her decks.”

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