“He threw the gasoline on the floor,” Detective Malvey said. “He threw in a couple of matches.” He said Mr. Gonzalez “didn’t know how bad it was when he left, but he came back and watched the firemen fight the fire.”
A Thousand Lives Lost in Burning Of the General Slocum
June 16, 1904
A view of the monument to Slocum victims in Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery in Queens.
AN ESTIMATED TOTAL OF A THOUSAND DEAD, besides several hundred injured, is the record of the fire disaster which yesterday destroyed the big excursion steamer General Slocum, which was burned to the water’s edge before her captain succeeded in beaching her on North Brother Island. Nearly all the dead and mussing are women and children and were members of an excursion part taken out by St. Mark’s German Lutheran Church of East 6th Street.
The disaster stands unparalleled among those of its kind. Whole families have been wiped out. In many instances a father is left to grieve alone for wife and children, and there was hardly a home in the parish, whence but a few hours before a laughing happy crowd went on its holiday, that was not in deep mourning last night.
The scenes attendant upon the disaster have seared themselves in the brains of the survivors never to be effaced. Women were roasted to death in sight of their husbands and children, and babes by the score perished in the waters of the East River, into which they had been thrown by frenzied mothers. With the death by fire behind them, hundred leaped to their doom in the river. Out of the awful record there stands forth bright and clear the heroic work of the watermen, the police, nurses, and the doctors, who saved hundreds at the risk of their own lives. Frenzied thousands, who had lost relatives thronged the Alexander Avenue station in the Bronx, the Morgue, the piers, and the vicinity of the church all night.
The General Slocum started from her prier at East 3rd Street shortly after 9 o’clock. Accounts differ as to just where the boat was when the fire started. Certain it is that it went through Hell Gate without evidences of panic being noticed, for the band was playing and people on the shore remarked that the Slocum had a big party on board that was apparently having a good time.
It is believed that the fire started from the explosion of a stove in the galley on the lower deck, where chowder was being cooked. Here a lot of odds and ends of rope, canvas, oily rags, and other truck were stored.
The dread cry of “Fire” sounded through the boat about an hour after she left her pier. Almost immediately there was a muffled explosion, and a sheet of flame enveloped the forward part of the boat. It was then that the trouble was first seen from the shore, the boat being opposite 135th Street.
Survivors say the life preservers were worthless and rotted away in the hands of those who attempted to use them.
65 Years Later, Recognition of a Seaman’s Heroics
By CLYDE HABERMAN | November 11, 2008
ON VETERANS DAY, AMERICA PAYS TRIBUTE to those who served, including some whose achievements went unrecognized for far too long. Someone, for example, like Seymour Wittek.
During World War II, the Brooklyn-born Mr. Wittek, now 87, was Seaman Second Class Wittek of the United States Coast Guard, assigned to a munitions detail in Jersey City. He and his mates loaded bombs and ammunition destined for American troops fighting in Europe. One ship that they filled with explosives was El Estero, a freighter of Panamanian registry docked at a New Jersey pier.
On April 24, 1943, the Estero caught fire below deck. It is impossible to overstate how serious this was. Roughly 5,000 tons of bombs, depth charges and small-arms ammunition were stored on the Estero and nearby ships and railroad cars. If the Estero exploded—and that was a real possibility—a chain reaction could have engulfed all that ammunition and spread to fuel storage tanks in Bayonne, N.J., and on Staten Island. Later estimates of the potential death toll on both sides of the Hudson reached into the thousands, even the tens of thousands.
Beyond the carnage, “the course of history could have been changed,” said James J. McGranachan, a civilian spokesman for the Coast Guard. “It would have shut down the port. When you think of all the supplies that were coming out of New York, it could have affected the landing at Normandy”—D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Without blinking, Seaman Wittek and dozens of his fellow seamen volunteered to board the burning ship and fight the out-of-control fire, which was later found to have been accidentally caused. On the deck, he recalled, the heat from below was so intense that he could feel it through his shoes.
Soon, an order came to scuttle the ship. In a race against time, it was towed to deep water in Upper New York Bay, where fireboats pumped water into the cargo holds. “Some flares and shells exploded,” The New York World-Telegram reported in an article that did not appear until two years later, a delay that reflected wartime secrecy. But, nearly four hours after it caught fire, the freighter sank into the bay. Not a single death resulted from the operation.
Time passed, and memories of the Estero faded. But it always stuck in Mr. Wittek’s craw that New York City never formally recognized the heroics of those seamen. Some had received medals in the 1940’s from Bayonne, but not from New York or, for that matter, from the Coast Guard.
Seaman Wittek and dozens of his fellow seamen volunteered to board the burning ship and fight the out-of-control fire. On the deck, the heat from below was so intense that he could feel it through his shoes.
On this Veterans Day, the oversight will finally be corrected. Mr. Wittek, long retired from the fur industry, will receive the Coast Guard Commendation Medal for “outstanding achievement.”
The Coast Guard looked for others to honor, but “they couldn’t find anybody else but me,” Mr. Wittek said. His buddies will be there in spirit, though. “I’m going to say,” he explained with a catch in his voice, “that I’m accepting this in the name of all my friends. It’s for the rest of the guys.”
PLANE CRASHES AND CONSTRUCTION
Air Tragedy Raises Big Questions
December 18, 1960
WITH THE ADVENT OF THE JET, AIR TRAVEL has expanded enormously. More and more planes fly faster and more often with ever-growing passenger loads. Traffic congestion—particularly around big cities where airlines converge—has become a problem that seems constantly to outgrow man’s efforts to solve it.
That problem was driven home with stunning impact last week by the greatest airline disaster in United States history. Out of lowering skies over Brooklyn a jet plunged into a block of houses and turned them into a holocaust. At the same moment a prop-driven plane fell in pieces onto Staten Island; in the wreckage was one of the jet’s engines—grim evidence that the two planes had collided. The toll, 137 people in the planes and on the ground, made 1960 the record year for air fatalities.
A mixture of rain and snow was falling as two big commercial airliners approached the New York area. One was a United Airlines four-engine DC-8 jet bound for Idlewild from Chicago with 84 people aboard. The other was a TWA four-engine Super Constellation bound for La Guardia from Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, with 44 people aboard. Visibility was poor.
The toll, 137 people in the planes and on the ground, made 1960 the record year for air fatalities.
The DC-8 was ordered by the air traffic center to enter the rectangular stack over Preston, N.J., at 5,000 feet. The Constellation was directed to enter another stack over Linden, N.J., at 6,000 feet before getting clearance to come down to 5,000 feet and approach La Guardia. There should have been five miles of air space between the rectangular routes of the two planes in their respective stacks.
Instead, they apparently collided. One of the DC-8’s jet engines was found on Staten Island. Investigators also recovered a sealed recording device from the DC-8, which contains a taped transcript of data about changes in course, speed or altitude.
The Day the Boy Fell From the Sky
By WENDELL JAMIESON | March 24, 2002
BARBARA LEWNES WAS BARBARA STULL THEN, 22 years old and six months out of the nursing schoo
l at Methodist Hospital. She remembers it as a fine time: dates in Manhattan with young doctors, including the one she married a few years later. Broadway shows. Drinks at Trader Vic’s. And being a nurse.
Her sweet but sometimes vague memories click into focus on Dec. 16, 1960. She heard the sirens at 10:30 a.m., when she was walking down the street, half a block from the hospital. Inside, she heard the words: plane crash.
There was talk of a survivor from the jet, a little boy found in a snowbank and taken to Methodist in a police car. A fireman told her that the boy had been flying without his parents and had lived because he’d been sitting on a stewardess’s lap in a jump seat. When the jet hit, the fireman surmised, the back door had popped open and the child had been thrown out. She looked over the snowbank: the plane’s door was still open.
Around 6 p.m., she stopped at the security office to tell the director of nursing, Edith Roberts, that she would be back for her shift at midnight. There was a pause. Miss Roberts said to wait, and she went to talk to someone.
A few minutes later, Miss Roberts said, “‘Barbara, we’ll use you. You’ll special him tonight.’”
“Special.” That terribly burned boy would be hers.
He had been placed in a glassed-in nursery and was surrounded by doctors, nurses, equipment. Shortly before midnight, the doctors updated her on Stephen’s condition. Then, one by one, their orders given, they left. By 12:30 a.m., she realized that she was alone with two young nursing students and Stephen Baltz.
Silence, except for Stephen’s halting breaths.
Stephen had been sleeping when she got there, but a little later, he suddenly chirped up with the bell-like voice of a healthy child. He felt fine. He wanted a television. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said gently. “I’ll see about finding one.”
Around 7 a.m., a doctor reappeared. Soon, the room was crowded with doctors and administrators—and her day-shift replacement.
“He seemed more alert,” she said. “I decided, you know, he’s going to make it.” She headed back to her apartment. It was going to be a beautiful, clear winter day.
Stephen Baltz died at 10 a.m.
The hospital never called her to tell her. She learned about it from the radio, when she woke up that afternoon.
A Wounded City Sheds New Tears
By DAN BARRY | November 13, 2001
WHEN THE WORD CAME IN THE MORNING, IT was almost too much.
There they were in Midtown, hundreds of mental-health workers attending a Red Cross seminar on how to help people cope with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. For purposes of comparison, they were watching a presentation on the airplane explosion in 1988 that devastated the Scottish town of Lockerbie, when, suddenly, the lights went up and an urgent message was delivered: a jetliner had just crashed in Queens.
Dr. Paul Ofman, who interrupted the program to deliver the news, is an expert in the aftereffects of disaster and chairman of emergency services for the Red Cross in New York. Even so, his initial reaction was visceral, and universal.
“This can’t be real,” he remembers thinking.
But it was. For a city and a region, the plane crash was the deadly car accident that derails the funeral procession. Just when a city and region was returning to what passes these days as normality, bang: hundreds more dead, the Rockaways ablaze, tons of debris falling from the heavens, and a community in panic.
All the while, the horrific words and images emanating from Queens carried the unsettling air of the familiar. The bridges and tunnels were being closed—again. Hundreds of soot-covered firefighters were battling a monstrous disaster—again. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was urging residents to remain calm—again.
Just two months and a day from the morning when two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the only hint of comfort lay in the reactions of law-enforcement officials who did not respond as if this jetliner crash had been caused by terrorism. “That this would be a source of relief, or confer a sense of safety, is a sign of how altered these times that we live in are,” said Dr. Ofman.
Deriving good news from a plane crash that killed hundreds was an unsettling process for many. Fran Rushing, a California resident who was visiting her son in Long Island City, said that she was shocked at times by how she digested the morning’s news. She said that she dreaded the thought that came next: “That we’d settle in and say, ‘Oh thank goodness, it’s just a normal old 300-person-dead plane crash.’”
“What have I come to?” she asked.
Flaming Horror on the 79th Floor
By JAMES BARRON | July 28, 1995
Photographer Ernie Sisto crawled out on a ledge while two newsmen held his legs as he took this photo in 1945.
THE LAST THING THE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLler at La Guardia Airport told the pilot that foggy Saturday morning 50 years ago today sounded almost like an afterthought: “At the present time, I can’t see the top of the Empire State Building.”
“Roger, tower, thank you,” the pilot, Lieut. Col. William F. Smith Jr., muttered into his push-to-talk cockpit microphone, heading west toward Newark.
A minute or two later, disoriented and dodging the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the B-25 saw the top of the Empire State Building—through the windshield. Roaring along at 200 miles an hour, the plane slammed into the 78th and 79th floors, gouging an 18-by-20-foot hole 913 feet above 34th Street. Fourteen people died in the crash and the fire that followed: Colonel Smith and the two others in the plane, and 11 in what was then the world’s tallest building.
The fuel tanks exploded. An engine and part of the landing gear plummeted through an elevator shaft into the subbasement. The other engine plowed through the building, emerging on the 33rd Street side and crashing through the roof of a sculptor’s studio. Windows shattered even on the tall building’s lowest floors, hurling chunks of glass toward the street.
To New Yorkers who had watched their steel-frame skyline climb higher and higher in the 1920’s and 1930’s—and who had worried about enemy airplanes as World War II dragged on—it was one of those where-were-you-when moments, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy a generation later.
“I don’t think any one of us had any idea of what had happened,” said Therese Fortier Willig, a secretary in the Catholic War Relief office on the 79th floor. “Who’d have thought a plane?“
Mrs. Willig said she and those in her office who were not killed instantly crowded into a room with a door they could close to seal out the smoke. “I thought we were going to die,” she said. In despair, she pulled her rings off her fingers—her high-school graduation ring and a friendship ring from her boyfriend—and lobbed them out the window, never expecting to see them again.
But a few days later, the Fire Department found them amid the debris on 34th Street, and returned them. A couple of years later, she married the man who had given her the friendship ring, and had a son who also had an affinity for high places—George Willig, who climbed the World Trade Center in the 1970’s.
Old Hands Didn’t Have To Be Told What to Do
By JIM DWYER | January 17, 2009
AROUND 3:30 ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, Capt. Carl Lucas fired up the engines on the Athenia, a high-speed catamaran ferry docked at a pier in Weehawken, N.J., getting ready for the evening commuters on the Hudson River. The first wave would start in half an hour.
Then he spotted a plane in the water.
“We just threw off the lines and went out there,” said Captain Lucas, 34.
At the same pier, Capt. John Winiarski, 52, and a deckhand, Frank Illuzzi, 62, were on board the catamaran the Admiral Richard E. Bennis. They noticed the Athenia speeding away.
“We seen them scurrying out into the river, so we turned around and saw the plane in the river,” Captain Winiarski said. “We made a beeline.”
And so it went: a flotilla of rescuers, created by people who caught glimpses of something going wrong and did not have to be told to help. The Athenia, the Admiral Bennis and 12 other boats—all operate
d or chartered by New York Waterway—picked 135 people out of the river. The crews stopped their work and changed the world.
One of the ferry captains, Manuel Liba, ticked off the strokes of fortune: the pilot brought the plane down smoothly, the Hudson was calm, it was daylight and it was 45 minutes before the evening rush on the river.
There was more than luck. On a bitter, frigid afternoon, the plane had come down minutes from people who regularly practice helping. The first ferry to reach it was the Thomas Jefferson, which pulled out of Pier 79 on the Hudson River at 39th Street in Manhattan. “As we turned around, we noticed the plane in the water,” said Vincent Lombardi, captain of the Thomas Jefferson. “We thought it was an odd-looking vessel.”
He radioed the Coast Guard, then headed for the plane.
“It was hard to stay next to it, but you practice that by throwing life rings in the water and trying to stay alongside them,” said Brittany Catanzaro, 20, the captain of the Thomas Kean and a ferry pilot for five months. “One of the people got on board, turned around and hugged my deckhand. We’re just working as if we’re training and drilling.”
The last person to leave a life raft was Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the captain of the US Airways flight. He climbed aboard the Athenia after everyone else had been lifted to safety. “Very calm,” Captain Lucas reported. “He had a metal clipboard with the passenger manifest. He came up into the wheelhouse, and we tried to organize a count of who was recovered from the water. I asked him if he thought there was anyone left on the plane. He said no, that he had checked twice himself.”
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