by Ed O'Donnell
Hearken! What wails of anguish and terror pierce the skies. Mothers in heart-rending tones crying for the children that have been torn from their grasp; sisters and daughters vainly struggling in the waters, imploring assistance in the final notes of terror and despair; husbands frantically calling upon wives, and fathers upon children.
A moment longer, and those dying cries and struggles are over. The dreadful work of death is finished…transpiring under the very shadow of our homes….
In all, sixty people perished that afternoon aboard the Henry Clay. Thirty-seven days later the Reindeer exploded near Albany, killing thirty- one.
More and more, as steam replaced sail, the number of accidents and resulting deaths rose. That steamer technology grew safer did little to diminish the toll, simply because the number of steamers in service rose dramatically, as did their size and passenger capacity. Almost every year in the 1850s and 1860s a steamboat exploded and burned. None was greater than the explosion of the Sultana in May 1865 on the Mississippi River, a disaster that claimed as many as two thousand Union soldiers. Indeed, the steamboat accident was so commonplace in this era that when in 1871 future secretary of state John Hay published a poem about a heroic riverboat captain, Jim Bludso, who died saving all his passengers after his vessel caught fire, it became a classic recited for decades to come.
And, sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
Such was not the case in New York on July 30, 1871, when the steam-powered Staten Island ferry Westfield exploded, killing 104. A subsequent investigation revealed that the boat’s boilers had been seriously compromised by corrosion. Despite howls of protest and demands for stricter safety measures in the wake of the Westfield tragedy, little was done to improve safety beyond passage of a new set of rarely enforced regulations. This was made abundantly clear only nine years later in New York when the paddle steamer Seawanhaka suffered an engine explosion while plying the always treacherous waters of Hell Gate. Captain Charles
D. Smith chose to beach his wounded craft immediately in shallows just beyond Hell Gate known as Sunken Meadow. His quick thinking, not to mention heroic rescues by nearby boats, saved most of his three hundred passengers, including such notables as New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana, millionaire merchant and future mayor W. A. Grace, and publishing magnate James W. Harper. But sixty-two perished, including Captain Smith.
Once again tragedy aboard a steamer produced cries of outrage and charges of negligence followed by an investigation and pledges by public officials to raise safety standards and strengthen enforcement. Yet, as before, the changes were minimal and steamboats continued to explode and catch fire. But because the number of fatalities was low, public pressure to reform the steamboat inspection service never persisted. Late-nineteenthcentury Americans, moreover, were more accepting of accidents and the deaths and injuries that resulted. Charges of negligence were often levied in the wake of train wrecks, hotel fires, and ferry sinkings, but uttered more as cries of despair and anger rather than the openings of major legal actions seeking punitive and compensatory damages. Lawsuits for negligence in this era rarely succeeded, because the law and legal establishment reflected Victorian America’s perception of risk and accident. Life, they understood, was full of perils, and there was only so much one could do— or expect others to do—to minimize risk to life and limb. Their Christian faith, no matter what denomination, supported this worldview, and in the editorials, sermons, and pitiful testimonials that followed catastrophes they often alternated between scathing indictments of those deemed responsible and plaintive questions about the inscrutable nature of God’s will and purpose.
The most recent waterfront calamity had taken place just four years earlier. On June 30, 1900, a fire broke out among some cargo piled on the Hoboken waterfront. Fanned by a stiff breeze and fueled by ample amounts of cotton and oil, it quickly raged out of control and jumped to nearby steamships of the German Lloyd Line. Four massive vessels caught fire, many loaded with passengers, crew, and sightseers. Fireboats, tugs, and other boats converged on the harrowing scene, but there was little they could do. The Kaiser Wilhelm der Gross fared best. Although afire, the ship pulled away from the pier and all aboard were rescued. The Saale and Bremen likewise cast off, but not before the fires aboard them roared out of control. Rescuers watched in horror as victims trapped belowdecks tried desperately to wriggle through small portholes of ships that had been turned into floating crematoriums. The Main burned and sank at its pier. By the time the fires were extinguished, four hundred were dead. “Nobody who saw it ever forgot the Hudson on that summer night,” wrote New York fire chief John Kenlon years later, “four great liners vomiting flame and smoke, surrounded by puffing tugs and busy fireboats, while perhaps two dozen smaller craft floated hither and thither in the most congested waterway in the world, aflame from stem to stern.”
Certainly Captain Van Schaick had not forgotten it. How could he? It was one of the most spectacular maritime disasters in American history, surpassed only by scenes of naval warfare. Still, it was not the kind of event that veteran pilots dwelt upon. It was a freak accident, gruesome to be sure, but one nonetheless beyond the control of mere mortals and their safety measures. Such a scene of horror and destruction might make old salts like Van Schaick shudder, but it had no impact on their approach to their job. Nor did more recent news that three weeks earlier, on May 26, 1904, the steam-powered towboat Fred Wilson had exploded near West Louisville, Kentucky, killing eleven.
By the turn of the century, new technology and increased safety standards rendered boiler explosions rare events. In fact, Americans in 1904 had grown accustomed to the idea of loading thousands of people on a small vessel and heading out to sea—across the Atlantic and along the coast. They believed steamers to be more or less safe, especially for travel across short distances. The truly dangerous way to travel was widely understood to be the railroad. Between July 1, 1902, and June 30, 1903, for example, 9,840 Americans were killed on the railroads (1 for every 70,620 passengers) versus 1,303 lives lost on steamers (1 for every 422,102).
Most Americans would have agreed with the USSIS Annual Report for 1904 when it asserted that “transportation by water is … the safest of the many methods of transportation.” Certainly Captain Van Schaick did—and he had the record to prove it.
PERILS REAL AND IMAGINED
They began to fill with passengers that evening even before the Slocum tied up at its pier. At various locations along the city’s two rivers, steamers bound for Coney Island took on thousands of New Yorkers. Passengers took their seats and talked excitedly about the evening that lay ahead—the hours of rides, games, food, and exhibitions made all the more sensational by the great shower of white light that bathed the three great parks. Since no one could possibly experience all that Coney Island had to offer in one night, especially with the addition that year of Luna and Dreamland Parks, many debated what to see and in what order. Without a doubt, many planned to see one of several offerings in a new and immensely popular entertainment genre: the disaster spectacle.
All spring, crowds packed a massive theater at Dreamland done up to look like a Roman temple to witness the Fall of Pompeii. Audiences found themselves both terrified and thrilled by the most modern special effects known to the industry, including a pyrotechnic Vesuvius eruption that routinely sent dozens bolting for the exits before the show was over. Equally spectacular and popular was the reenactment of recent disasters like the Johnstown Flood, which in 1889 saw 3,000 people swept away after a dam burst and inundated the town. Likewise the reenactment of the Galveston Flood of 1900 drew huge crowds to see the bustling city of Galveston, Texas, put under fifteen feet of raging sea by a monumental hurricane, an event that claimed some 8,000 lives. Both tragedies still loomed large in the popular memory and every day drew thousands of eager viewers.<
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Why these spectacles of death and disaster appealed to so many people is not hard to discern. To some extent, people came to marvel at the ability of Coney’s engineers and designers to pull off such astonishing epics. More important, they were drawn by the prospect of “seeing” the disaster they had read and heard so much about. In an age before film began to capture for the masses scenes of war and disaster, the public hungered for a chance to view scenes of mass destruction. Still photography, beginning with the Civil War photographs of Mathew Brady, had satisfied an earlier generation seeking more than the dry details of battles and fires provided by newspapers. Now, at the turn of the twentieth century, audiences wanted more and the entrepreneurs at Coney Island were prepared to give it to them.
But the crowds that flocked to see the Fall of Pompeii and the Galveston Flood were after something more than mere spectacle. For out of all these tales of human tragedy there were always stories of courage, heroism, and sacrifice. Audiences gasped, cheered, and cried as rescuers risked their lives to pluck the innocent from the jaws of death and parents sacrificed theirs to save their children. If New York’s highbrow set found their inspiration in performances of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies, the city’s great unwashed found it at Coney Island.
There was also something oddly comforting about these disaster spectacles. For every day city dwellers faced a wide array of very real perils that seemed only one errant step, one unsuspecting moment away. Every day New Yorkers picked up the newspaper to read stories of calamities big and small. It all added up to an annual total of nearly eight thousand New Yorkers perishing for reasons other than natural causes—accidents, murder, epidemics, and more. To outsiders, death in the big city seemed utterly random and unpredictable. The residents of poorer districts like the Lower East Side, of course, knew differently. Death was a more frequent visitor in their neighborhoods than in Gramercy Park or on Fifth Avenue.
Danger lurked at every intersection. Each year hundreds of New Yorkers were killed or maimed by careening streetcars, runaway horses, or out- of-control automobilists. Just that afternoon two little girls out picking flowers had been killed by a speeding trolley. Worse were the perils encountered in the workplace, the result of lax safety standards and intense competition that led many a building contractor and factory owner to cut costs by scrimping on safety. Even the home offered only partial refuge. Each year gas leaks alone killed hundreds, while others were done in by building collapses, falls from open windows, and tumbles down flights of stairs. The home also afforded no defense against the greatest killer of all, disease, the invisible force that constantly ravaged the city, especially the poorest sections like the Lower East Side. Diseases like diphtheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and pneumonia struck hard in the hot summer months and took their greatest toll among the very old and the very young. In the case of the latter, there were additional threats, particularly infantile paralysis.
Given these perils of everyday urban life, a trip to one of Coney Island’s disaster spectacles allowed the public to count their blessings. These disasters were the problems of other people and they dwarfed anything the audience had experienced. The more horrific the destruction and the greater the loss of life, the safer they felt.
But the popularity of the Johnstown Flood and the Fall of Pompeii was dwarfed by a different kind of disaster spectacle that opened in the spring of 1904. Luna Park’s Fire and Flames exhibit was not based on any specific catastrophe, but rather on everyday life in the crowded tenement districts of New York City. When the curtain was raised, there stood on- stage several full-sized tenements aligned to resemble a portion of a typical Lower East Side block. The “street” in the foreground teemed with hundreds of passersby, pushcart peddlers selling their wares, and children playing hide-and-go-seek.
Suddenly this tranquil urban scene erupted in chaos. First smoke and then flames began pouring from an upper tenement window. Onlookers shouted “Fire!” and ran about in panic. Women and children began screaming from windows near the flames—“Help! We’re trapped! Help!”
Just when all seemed lost, the loud clang of a fire bell proclaimed to all that help was on the way. A moment later several fire engines arrived. Dozens of burly men, many of them real firemen moonlighting for extra cash, leapt from the rig and proceeded to save the day. Several ran into the building with axes while others unfurled hoses and began pouring streams of real water into the flaming windows. Another group stretched out a tarp and caught the women and children as they jumped from the windows. In a few minutes it was all over. Heroic manhood had saved innocent lives and property, and everyone could return to their everyday lives.
The creators of Fire and Flames recognized that in 1904 nothing so frightened the public like fire. This was not because fires claimed the most lives each year. Far from it. In 1903 fires swept away just nineteen people, far fewer than those taken by disease or traffic accidents. What made fire so terrifying was its unique nature. In the list of worrisome possibilities, fire stood in a category all its own. There was nothing else quite like it.
Unlike the annual summer epidemics, fire had no season. It struck every day of the week, every month of the year. There was no opportunity to psychologically steel one’s nerves, no preparing for it by purchasing medicines (no matter how useless) or keeping the children indoors, as was the case with summer epidemics. Fire came suddenly and without warning, the result of a spark from a match or cigarette, an accidentally overturned lamp or a simple stove fire. It moved with lightning speed, accomplishing its task in minutes. A typical tenement fire might leave behind a smoke-filled apartment and several people with frazzled nerves, or the corpses of a dozen innocents caught in its path.
People groped for words to accurately describe fires. Press accounts of conflagrations typically referred to fire as if it were an animate force. Fires “raged” out of control, “leapt” from building to building, “raced swiftly” through an apartment, and “devoured” property and lives. Accounts similarly attributed physical features to fire, frequently describing “tongues” of flame that “licked” at victims hanging out windows. Others wrote of “ravenous” blazes that “roared” and “clawed” their way through a building. These same writers likewise employed sinister language to characterize fires as evil forces, often calling them “fiendish,” “monstrous,” “murderous,” and “rapacious.” Currier and Ives titled one of their many lithographs of heroic firemen “Facing the Enemy.” One of the most common terms employed embodied all these animate and otherworldly characteristics: a fire was “a demon.” Such perceptions of fire likewise led to descriptions of firemen “smothering” and “drowning” flames. Indeed, one of the more popular models of fire extinguishers in the mid-nineteenth century was called Phillips’ Fire Annihilator.
Fire was especially unnerving because people knew they were powerless against it. Fire-prevention technology and laws lagged far behind the realities of urban life. Fire escapes were mandated by law, but a lack of enforcement allowed many landlords to avoid them altogether, or to comply with the letter of the law by affixing a pathetic ladder or set of wooden stairs to their building’s rear facade. Few buildings had fire alarms and only a handful, mainly new ones catering to upscale renters, possessed sprinklers or fire hoses. In 1904, fire still had the upper hand.
Perhaps the truest measure of the level of fear inspired by fire can be found in the many instances of deadly panics it sparked. On September 19, 1902, for example, some two thousand African-Americans crowded into the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, to listen to an address by Booker T. Washington. Just as the evening’s events were about to get under way, there came cries from an adjacent room of what sounded like “Fire!” In seconds the orderly crowd disintegrated into a crazed mob frantically making for the exits. Church leaders appealed for calm but to no avail, and when it was all over more than one hundred people lay crushed to death. And the fire? There was none. Someone had mistaken shouts of “Fight�
� emanating from a fracas between some youths. It was with these kinds of horrors in mind that Oliver Wendell Holmes would later declare that free speech did not permit a person to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
There was an additional aspect to fire that made it so worrisome to so many—they couldn’t live without it. Tens of thousands of years since the first humans managed to capture and manipulate it for their own ends, modern man’s reliance on fire had only grown more acute. Fire heated and illuminated the homes of 4 million New Yorkers. Fire cooked their food, propelled their trains and steamboats, and drove the factory machinery. Fire also provided the sleepless city with light each night via tens of thousands of gas lamps. Fire meant life—a fact made abundantly clear a few years later in Jack London’s famous short story, “To Build a Fire.”
It was an irony from which there seemed no escape. New Yorkers were utterly dependent upon and surrounded by the very thing they dreaded most. Fire, according to an ancient truism, was “a good servant, but a bad master.” Few in 1904 New York City would disagree. All they had to do was look in the daily papers to find a regular column entitled “Yesterday’s Fires” listing the address, time, and amount of damage for each fire as if it were a box score.
The year 1904 had begun with people talking about fire and its destructive powers, for in December 1903 a fire tore through Chicago’s Iroquois Theater, claiming 602 lives. The scale of the horror in Chicago was so great that many cities, including New York, toughened their fire codes at public venues like theaters. By then two additional catastrophic fires had come and gone. On February 7, fire destroyed twenty-five hundred businesses in Baltimore’s central business district. A few weeks later, on February 26, fire broke out in downtown Rochester, New York, and reduced dozens of buildings to smoldering heaps.