A new book details the history of a hotel built to look like an ocean liner perched high in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

Ship Hotel has sailed, but a jaunty new book honors its history and heyday

The story of the Ship Hotel is one of dreams fulfilled and dreams dashed, of a delightfully preposterous roadside attraction that brought comfort and joy to many before its long, sad decline and spectacular demise.

Brian Butko tells it masterfully in “The Ship Hotel: A Grand View Along the Lincoln Highway” (Stackpole Books). Part scrapbook, part family album, part communal memoir, this visually bountiful, right-sized book can be read just about in a single sitting, maybe curled up with a cuppa joe in vintage Ship Hotel china.

Before there was a Ship Hotel there was a Grand View Point, “just one of many scenic spots in the mountains of Pennsylvania where entrepreneurs thought they could sell some pie and cold drinks or pennants and postcards to motorists pulled over to cool their radiators, brakes and tempers,” Mr. Butko writes. “The mountaintop view gave added reason to stop, and soon many stands had lookout towers or telescopes.”

Grand View Point was the name given to a sharp curve 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, 17 miles west of Bedford and a mile east of Bald Knob Summit, at 2,906 feet the highest point on the Lincoln Highway — U.S. Route 30 — in Pennsylvania.

In 1928, Herbert Paulson, a native of the Netherlands, built at the curve the castle-themed Grand View Point Hotel, with rooftop turrets and four floors, three below road level. Three years later, with the help of German-born Albert Sinnhuber as building designer, he enlarged and remodeled it to look like an ocean liner because, an early WPA travel guide reported, the morning mists in the valley reminded him of billowing ocean waves. Mr. Paulson, who made annual or biannual trips to Europe, also had a big love of the sea, Mr. Butko believes.