Earlier tonight, at 6:42 p.m., was the ninetieth anniversary, to the minute, of the Malbone Street wreck, the worst disaster in New York transit history and the third-worst disaster in Brooklyn history. (The top two were a fire in 1876 in the Brooklyn Theatre on Fulton Street that claimed 295 lives, and the 1960 crash of an airliner in Park Slope that killed 95.)
I've been researching the wreck because it took place underground directly in front of Prospect Park. (Above, the tunnel leading into the Prospect Park station where an unqualified motorman, filling in for a striking worker, lost control of the train along a dangerous downhill curve, leading to a derailment and pile-up that killed at least 93 rush-hour commuters.) The wreck also ranked among the 10 worst disasters in metropolitan New York until 9/11. (The worst, a fire aboard the steamboat General Slocum, took 1,030 lives.)
Lincoln Road entrance to Prospect Park station of Brighton Beach subway line, 1916 and today.
Image, above left: Brooklyn's Flatbush by Brian Merlis and Lee A. Rosenzweig
The grisly events of November 1, 1918 made Malbone Street, a grim name to start with, so infamous that it was rechristened Empire Boulevard. The accident lived in Brooklyn's memory for decades. But even decades melt away, and remembrance fades. There is no monument to the Malbone Street victims, but even monuments don't confer immortality on grief; there is one (in Green-Wood Cemetery) to the Fulton Street fire casualties, and another (in Tompkins Square Park) to those who perished on the General Slocum, and those tragedies are comparably obscure. (However, fellow Brooklyn blogger Flatbush Gardener has posted a moving tribute to the Malbone wreck: a meticulous Google map of the victims' homes. Amazing use of the tools of the present to bring alive the past!)
Many aspects of this 1918 story evoked disturbing comparisons to 9/11: the surreal disruption of an ordinary working day (November 1 was a Saturday in 1918, but many people still worked a 6-day week); the carnage and the chaos of rescue operations; the frantic efforts to locate the missing; the years of finger-pointing and litigation over settlements to victims' families; the gnawing lack of "closure." (The Malbone motorman, who survived uninjured, was prosecuted for manslaughter but acquitted, and was believed to have lived in obscurity to old age.) But perhaps the most unnerving parallel is the city's ability to heal and regenerate and keep on going—and, eventually, to begin to forget, the one thing that everyone in the immediate aftermath swears must never be done.
On these days of the dead—today, All Saints Day (and tomorrow, All Souls Day)—I found myself warily cheered by that thought. This month and next contain the anniversaries of the deaths of both my parents and four other beloved elders, all gone within the past few decades; each year I find it harder to remember who died on which date. This year, I decided not to transfer the notations to my calendar, and to just wish them all well at Mass this weekend and be done with it. No matter what memories lie beneath our feet, there is always a new day to walk in the park—preferably with someone young enough not to remember.
Above: Ocean and Flatbush Avenues, 2008
More about the disaster:
The Malbone Street Wreck by Brian Cudahy (Fordham University Press, 1999)
The American Experience, "New York Underground" (a PBS series)
NYCsubway.org, a site for subway obsessives.
Forgotten New York, for the clearest explanation of what happened where.
Comments