by Ed O'Donnell
At 3:50 P.M. the tugboat Fidelity, one that had saved so many lives in the minutes after the Slocum hit North Brother Island, drew up to the Charities Pier with the first cargo of dead. Deckhands jumped from the boat and secured its lines. A team of morgue workers waited by a massive stack of rough pine coffins of every possible size. One by one the bodies were lifted from the tug, wrapped in blankets or tarpaulins. On the pier, workers hastily removed these makeshift shrouds and placed the bodies in coffins. Then two men carried each coffin into the temporary morgue and set them down in two long rows. Wooden blocks were placed under the heads of the coffins to raise them for easier identification. Ice was immediately poured over the bodies, filling in the empty spaces and leaving little more than the faces exposed. A photographer from the coroner’s office then snapped a picture to aid in future identification. The ritual was repeated thirty times until the tug was empty. At 4:55 the tug Massasoit arrived with eighty more.
By now the crowd outside the Charities Pier exceeded ten thousand. With the Slocum ordeal now nearly seven hours old, people were in creasingly agitated and hundreds of policemen were on hand. Many of those waiting pushed and elbowed each other in a struggle to get near the doors, and it took hours for the police to transform the mob into something resembling a line. Many were survivors, determined in spite of their injuries to wait as long as it took to enter the morgue. Others were relatives who had spent the day waiting and searching for missing family members. After a confusing day spent searching in several locations in Manhattan and the Bronx, all now knew that the morgue was the final stop, the place where their agonizing questions would be answered.
While they waited, they cried and offered each other words of consolation and hope. Some kept calling out to anyone who would listen, asking if they had seen their missing relative. Those who possessed them brought photographs and held them out to anyone who would look. Many families had split up during the day in order to check several locations at once. Now all were convening at the morgue. People walked about scanning the line in search of kin, hoping the others had good news. Journalists and photographers—by now every paper in the city had gotten into the act—also swarmed the area, interviewing searchers and taking pictures. Many let their hunger for gripping copy get the best of them. “The so-called journalists ran around with pencils poised,” one irate mourner remembered, “human bloodhounds sniffing a trail….As a group they showed neither tact, pity, nor concern for the bereaved, plying weeping mourners with all sorts of questions about the deceased.”
Suddenly above it all arose the jaunty beat of a band playing popular tunes. In all the confusion no one had thought to cancel the nightly concert on the nearby East 24th Street recreation pier. It was some time before the band was stopped, right in the middle of a rousing rendition of “The Monkey Wrapped His Tail Around the Flagpole.”
Asteady procession of horse-drawn vehicles convened upon the scene. Some were teamsters bringing ice and coffins to the morgue. Others were ambulances coming to bear away those who fainted or went mad. But the largest group by far were undertakers. Every few minutes another horse-drawn hearse clip-clopped up to the morgue, where it joined a long line of like vehicles. Among them were the four principal undertakers who served the St. Mark’s community, Jacob Herrlich, Hermann Kipp, F. Obendahl, and Philip Wagner, men to whom Mary Abendschein sold advertisement space in the excursion program. They were there as businessmen, to be sure, but it was not the sort of opportunity any of them would have wished for. All undertakers inevitably handle the affairs of people they know well. But on this night they’d already lost track of how many friends, neighbors, and fellow parishioners had called upon them to handle their affairs. They were overwhelmed emotionally, but also practically, and the latter would soon force them to turn away countless people they wanted to help.
Other undertakers, however, especially those not from the Little Germany neighborhood, viewed the Slocum disaster as a phenomenal business opportunity. These were not evil men for the most part. They were entrepreneurs competing in the everyday marketplace of death, and demand for their services had suddenly peaked. They were lined up to serve people in need. It was understood in 1904, just as it is in our day, that this would necessarily include a certain amount of bill padding and overcharging. But it was also understood that this would be done with a certain dignity and propriety.
Some of them, of course, lacked such restraint—so much so that critics would later charge they lacked even a soul. Like hardware store owners who triple the price of shovels during a snowstorm, these men viewed the Slocum disaster as a blizzard of death, a brief window of opportunity in which to reap tremendous profits at the expense of the weak, desperate, and uninformed. They arrived at the morgue with runners—men and boys armed with reams of contracts and business cards—and set them to canvassing the crowd in what one journalist described as “a shameless rivalry for business.” Their goal was simple enough: make a killing on the killing.
They spread rumors to induce panic buying—that is, to get people to sign contracts for an undertaker to remove a body and handle all the subsequent duties related to the wake, funeral, and burial. Undertakers are overwhelmed, they told the crowd. Sign now, went the pitch, and you need not worry that your loved one’s remains will be properly taken care of. Be advised, they warned, state law stipulates that only a licensed undertaker may remove the dead from the morgue. Do you want your wife or child languishing in that warehouse while you wait for an overbooked undertaker? We guarantee prompt service.
Dazed by grief and compelled by the fear expertly stoked by the agents, many in the crowd signed such contracts. Most did so thinking they were merely procuring transportation of the body to their homes, but the contracts contained language calling for complete undertaking services, from removal of the body from the morgue to transportation to the cemetery. They also failed to stipulate prices for these services, allowing for price gouging on a massive scale. Not surprisingly, given the bonanza of opportunity outside the morgue that night, several fights over customers broke out between these unscrupulous undertakers, or between irate mourners and undertakers, resulting in arrests and indignant headlines the next morning.
Finally at 7:00 P.M. the word came down that everything was in order and that people could begin entering the building to claim their loved ones. Stretched in two neat rows down the center of the long rectangular building were hundreds of pine coffins. Shafts of fading, late-evening sunlight shone down through large dusty windows located near the ceiling, reflecting off the inch-deep water left by the tons of melting ice. Over in one corner stood a table at which sat officials prepared to fill out death certificates and issue the permits required before an undertaker could remove a body. Every few feet along the rows of the dead stood morgue personnel and policemen, ready to intervene should anyone become hysterical at the sight of a dead family member. They would not have long to wait.
At one point in the preparations, Frederico DeStephano, a Herald photographer, asked Coroner Gustav Scholer of Manhattan to pose for a picture. Scholer, a pillar of the German community, stood in serious pose, dressed in a white suit and wearing a white broad-brimmed hat that gave him the appearance of Theodore Roosevelt. Before him were five open coffins containing the remains of children, each the picture of angelic calm and repose. Later that evening some of the women at the scene would add to this effect by placing flowers in the coffins holding children.
Policemen outside announced that relatives were to enter the building two abreast in groups of fifty and walk down the aisle between the coffins to view the row on the right, then peel off to the left and head back toward the entranceway allowing them to view the other row. Strict order would be enforced, the officer announced, and at the first sign of crowding or pushing the doors would be closed. Then the heavy steel doors swung open. Those toward the head of the line had been waiting nearly six hours and they suddenly felt overwhelmed by conflicting emotions—they were desperate to ge
t inside but dreaded what they would likely find. They walked in slowly, with halting steps that showed them to be filled with apprehension.
As at North Brother Island, it was a harrowing, trying sight. More than two hundred coffins filled with victims in every imaginable condition and position (although those burned beyond immediate recognition were held in the morgue proper). Searchers clutched each other as they shuffled down the watery aisle, scanning warily the field of misery at their feet. They passed countless people they knew, but kept moving. Occasionally they lingered over a coffin, drawn by some personal feature or article of clothing that suggested the person inside might be their parent, child, or sibling.
Peter J. Fickbohm, the man whose tranquil saloon received early word of the disaster, was one of the first to enter the morgue. Like so many others in the crowd, he had already been uptown to canvass the police station and hospitals. He now knew that one of his children, ten-year-old Fred, was alive and lying in a bed at Lebanon Hospital. He braced himself as he entered the morgue, knowing that his wife and two children were most likely somewhere in the line of death ahead. It took only a minute to find his wife Marie. He fought to keep his emotions in check, but as he knelt by the coffin he began to sob uncontrollably. A few moments later he stood up and walked with a morgue official to the table, where he filled out a death certificate. Then he rejoined the procession of searchers filing past the dead, now more certain than ever that his two missing children were among them.
Other identifications followed. Eugene Ansel, the deli owner who’d learned of his father’s death earlier in the day, searched for his two sons. Hours before he had found his wife at the Alexander Avenue police station. When he found his son Alfred, he simply knelt down and stroked the boy’s cold forehead. “Poor little boy,” he said in a barely audible voice, “poor little child. Why, oh, why did you go?” Not far away from him Mary King found the body of her sister. She too reacted with calm, quietly kneeling by the body and placing a rose on her sister’s chest.
Not everyone was able to contain their emotions. Frederika Weaver was already trembling and sobbing before she viewed her first coffin. “She had just started down the line of the dead,” wrote a Journal reporter, “when she gave a shriek terrible in the depth of emotion sounded.”
“I have found my Helen!” she wailed. “I have found my Helen!” Workers would have removed her to the hospital, but she insisted she be allowed to search for her two remaining daughters. She paced back and forth in a futile effort to compose herself, crying loudly all the while. Eventually she pressed on and at the end of the row found two coffins bearing Esther, age five, and Mamie, age seven.
“I have found them!” she called out. “I will go insane! I know I shall! …I shall die with grief, I know I shall.”
Many searchers lost their minds as soon as they saw their dead loved ones and tried to commit suicide by jumping in the river. One of the first was Catherine Diamond, who upon finding the body of her mother let out a shriek and bolted for the edge of the pier. She nearly made it over the side, but was caught by an alert doctor. It eventually took four men to restrain her. Jacob Denesch attempted to jump in the river after identifying the badly burned remains of his wife. Bernard Miller, the man who lost sight of his wife and four sons in the water when he was attacked by drown ing women, tried to jump and was caught. He begged the policemen, “Let me go. Let me die. I am without all that was dearest to me in life. I must die with them.” Lena Von Rekowski tried to jump with the coffin holding her ten-year-old daughter. Surrounded by morgue workers, she pulled out a bottle of carbolic acid—a popular method of suicide in 1904—and managed to drink some of it before being subdued. The dose was not fatal.
Over and over, these “scenes terrible, heart-breaking, indescribable,” as a Times reporter put it, broke out in the morgue. After a few hours they “made even the emotion-hardened morgue attendants wipe their eyes and turn away their heads.”
Morgue officials also faced another problem: some of the workers and volunteers were stealing from the dead. From the moment the first bodies were brought ashore at North Brother Island, Coroners O’Gorman and Berry had taken steps to prevent this all-too-common occurrence. Huge quantities of jewelry, watches, cash, and in some cases bankbooks and banknotes were removed from the dead and placed in sealed envelopes bearing a number that matched the body’s. This measure, they hoped, would prevent theft and assist in identification. Nonetheless, they received many reports of theft by workers throughout the day and into the night and requested the police to post additional detectives on the island and at the morgue.
As the night wore on and darkness enveloped the city, workers broke out dozens of portable lamps. Their glow heightened the macabre atmosphere of the morgue as searchers held them near the faces of those in the coffins to assist in identification. Despite the late hour, the crowd showed no sign of abating and indeed seemed to actually grow toward midnight.
Among those admitted at this time was Henry Kassenbaum of Green- point, Brooklyn. His wife Kate had presided over a large family reunion of eighteen Kassenbaums, Torniports, and Schnudes aboard the Slocum, a group that included his daughters, their husbands, and his grandchildren. Now only two remained: his wife and his daughter Henrietta, age thirty, in Harlem Hospital. Over the next twenty minutes he would find the bodies of five of his family members.
Many searchers like Kassenbaum were distressed to leave the morgue without finding all their family members, but others, at least on this first night when the disaster was still only hours old, did not despair. Until they found a body, they clung to the hope that their loved ones were safe—perhaps waiting in a different police station, or lying unconscious and unidentified in a hospital not yet visited. This was especially true of those who heard from survivors that their spouses or children had made it ashore, or onto a boat. Robert Wallace was one such man. His only child, eleven-yearold Rose, had gone on the excursion alone and not been found. Still, he believed she was alive, for one of the neighborhood boys said he saw her on North Brother Island. But Wallace had looked everywhere—the island, the Alexander Avenue police station, local hospitals, and now the morgue— but to no avail. “I fear she is among the dead,” he confided to a reporter outside the morgue, “but I cannot keep from hoping that maybe after all Otto really did see her, and that eventually she will be returned to me.” The next day he returned to the morgue and found Rose’s body.
Others clung to even thinner reeds of hope. Walter Peters, for example, found his wife’s body at the morgue, but not that of their seventeen-monthold baby, Lillian. But Peters had reason to believe she might be alive. “I know Lillian didn’t die with my wife,” he explained to officials at the morgue. “My wife was drowned, but she looks peaceful and there’s a smile on her face. She’d never have looked that way if she hadn’t known that the baby was safe.” A few hours later Peters’s hopes were dashed when he found his daughter among the dead.
Feeding these hopes were the occasional reunions of searchers and the sought in front of the morgue. Early in the evening, for example, three women stood in the line near the entrance, huddled together consoling each other. Suddenly people near them stirred and, looking up, they saw one of many they sought. There stood their eleven-year-old Minnie Weiss in a blue dress now streaked with water stains and mud. She’d just stepped off one of the tugboats delivering more bodies to the morgue. Minnie noticed her relatives at the same moment they saw her and broke into a run. The women burst through the line of policemen and threw their arms around the dazed girl in a scene witnessed by hundreds. Soon they were back in line, for thirteen members of the extended Weiss family had gone on the trip and all but Minnie were missing.
Outside the morgue, along what observers now began to call “Misery Lane,” the crowd continued to swell. It also became more agitated as those searchers who toured the rows of dead returned to the street and the anxious questions of those still waiting—Did you see my wife? My children? My brother
? Countless members of the crowd learned, even before entering the morgue, that inside lay the body of the one or ones they sought. Their cries of anguish and despair stirred the crowd and deepened its collective fear. “It was a mad, excited crowd,” wrote a Times reporter, “frenzied with grief to a point that meant self-destruction if unrestrained.” In other words, many tried to jump in the river and were stopped by a cordon of police.
By now it was clear to the policemen detailed to crowd control that many, perhaps a quarter or more, of the people outside the morgue had not lost a friend or relative on the Slocum. They were curiosity seekers, people motivated by a ghoulish desire to see the carnage up close. This startling development represented the darker side of the phenomenon of mass entertainment being pioneered at places like Coney Island and the Polo Grounds. The morgue offered a similar experience to that found at Luna Park’s smash hit exhibit Fire and Flames, just ratcheted up several notches and free of charge. The curiosity seeker could immerse himself in a scene of horror and literally stare death in the face. Unlike Coney Island, this spectacle involved real people rather than actors and had no happy ending. But the spectators among the mourners nonetheless walked away with the same sensation of excitement and relief felt upon exiting the Johnstown Flood exhibit or Fire and Flames.