From the Long-Forgotten Archives #4
This is Pier 54; or, rather, her skeletal remains dozing off along West Street between Little West 12th and 13th. She seems to long for some great ocean liner that never arrives. Back on April 18, 1912, however, she received one whose echo perhaps still rings in her steal. Let’s check out an excerpt then from The New York Times conveying what happened here on that indelible day:
The autos, holding veiled women and silent men, were allowed to park in front of [Pier 54], and each minute after 8:30 [PM] added to the number of cars there. Nearer than about 100 feet of the pier, however, they could not go unless they were expecting survivors of the wreck, for there Inspector McCluskey had stretched ropes dotted with green lights. By 9 o’clock there were more than 500 automobiles parked inside this space, the occupants of each having assured the police that they were present to receive relatives or friends, who had been passengers on the Titanic.
There was almost complete silence on the pier. Doctors and nurses, members of the Women’s Relief Committee, city and government officials, as well as officials of the [White Star Line/Cunard Line], moved nervously about. Seated where they had been assigned beneath the big customs letters corresponding to the initials of the names of the survivors they came to meet, was the mass of [2,000 people] on the pier.
And then the Carpathia was made fast, the gangplanks shot into place.
About each gangplank a portable fence had been put in place marking off some 50 feet of the pier, within which stood 100 or more customs officials. Next to the fence, crowded close against it, were anxious men and women, their gaze strained for a glance of the first from the ship, their mouths opened to draw their breaths in spasmodic, quivering gasps, their very bodies shaking with suppressed excitement, excitement which only the suspense itself was keeping in subjection.
Several minutes had passed already and then [finally] a woman, the dress she wore obviously patched up from contributions of the Carpathia’s passengers, her face red from weeping, her eyes starting almost from her head with the eagerness with which she stared for a known face, started down the gangplank, stopped, perplexed, almost ready to drop with terror and exhaustion, and was caught by a customs official.
“A survivor?” he questioned rapidly, and a nod of the head answering him, he demanded:
The answer given, he started to lead her toward that section of the pier where her friends would be waiting.
When she stepped from the gangplank there was quiet on the pier. The answers of the woman almost could be heard by those 50 feet away, but as she staggered rather than walked, clinging to the officer’s arm, toward the waiting throng outside the fence, a low wailing sound started from the crowd. Its cadences, wild and weird, grew steadily louder and louder till they culminated in a mighty shriek, which swept the whole big pier as though at the direction of some master hand.
(Text stitched together from the Times’ lengthy coverage of the Titanic disaster published on Friday, April 19, 1912. The headline read “Rescue Ship Arrives--Thousands Gather At the Pier.”
The ship sank on Monday, April 15th and its survivors arrived at Pier 54 aboard the Carpathia on Thursday, April 18th at 9:35 PM. The Times reported that 745 people had been rescued, but historians seem to place that number closer to 700 today.
The last of the castaways were finally able to leave the pier after midnight. They were four children under five years old who had contracted the measles: “It was said that the children were from Titanic’s steerage and that their parents were believed to have perished.”
Photo by Riffchorusriff. February 17, 2017.)
