The Triangle Fire (12 page)

9. MORGUE

Who is this that without death

Goes through the kingdom of the dead?

—
CANTO VIII
:84

Behind the closed doors of the Twenty-sixth Street pier, the thirty regular morgue attendants and Superintendent Yorke’s supplementary force of indigents and panhandlers prepared the dead to meet the living. The cavernous pier, said the
World
, “is the stage of all the abject tragedies of the city. Its floor is crossed by the insane, the paupers, the mean criminals, the helpless and the diseased on their way to the cold stone public institutions, charitable and penal, set on the islands in the river.”

At the time of the
Slocum
disaster, the Twenty-sixth Street block ending at the river had been given a new name—Misery Lane. On Saturday, it had begun to fill with a growing crowd even before the first ambulances arrived. By seven o’clock, there were two thousand people in Misery Lane. A cordon of policemen marched across the width of the street from the pier, sweeping everyone back to First Avenue. Twenty-five of them, with sticks drawn, remained at that point to keep the crowd from pouring down the block and into the pier.

As the first dead wagons swung around the First Avenue corner, they were followed by weeping, screaming men and women who were stopped by the cordon of police. The horse-drawn ambulances and patrol wagons passed down the block and through the huge pier doors. When the wagons had deposited their freight, they backed out slowly and returned for more bodies.

The derelicts and the doctors worked among the dead, the latter in the hope that someone might have survived. Coroners Holtzhauser and Hellenstein arrived at seven o’clock to join Coroner’s Physician Weston in supervising the work.

At the First Avenue police line the pressure of the crowd increased. “Mothers and wives had run frantically through the street in front of the carriers, pulling their hair from their heads and calling the names of their dear ones,” the
Times
wrote. When they were stopped at First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, their sobs and shrieks grew louder.

As each new wagon arrived, police with drawn clubs fought to open a path. But the frantic people closed against the rear of the wagons as soon as they passed, and hands reached out for the blankets and tarpaulins covering the dead.

Once a cover was torn off, revealing underneath two bodies somehow holding each other. “Everywhere burst anguished cries for sister, mother and wife, a dozen pet names in Italian and Yiddish rising in shrill agony above the deeper moan of the throng,” said the
Times
.

Inside the morgue, confusion arose over the numbering of the dead and their possessions. The police had used small colored tags provided by the Charities Department, and these were found to include some duplicate numbers. Moreover, the coroner’s men had renumbered some of the bodies and the jewelry envelopes.

Inspector Richard Walsh settled the problem by deciding to renumber all the bodies in one continuous count. Valuables were to be turned over to Lieutenant Sullivan for safekeeping. If a body could be identified, the lid was to be placed on the coffin and the entire thing was to be moved to one side. Until this procedure was complete, the crowd would be kept out.

A reporter for the
Times
who had been watching these preparations came out of the pier gate on his way to a telephone. He found himself besieged.

He wrote: “A hundred faces were turned up to him imploringly and a hundred anguished voices begged of him tidings of those within.

“Had he seen a little girl with black hair and dark complexion? Had he seen a tall thin man with stooped shoulders? Could he describe any one of the many he had seen in there?”

Inside, in the deepening darkness, small groups of policemen moved from box to box. One held pencil and pad; the others carried spot lanterns. They would stoop over an open box, and one of them would pull back the sheet covering the body.

“Box 112,” he droned to the one with the pencil and pad. Then, lifting pieces of clothing out of the box into the light of the lantern: “Female. Black shoes. Black stockings. Part of a brown skirt. White petticoat.”

On the first time around, an estimated $5,000 in cash was taken for safekeeping by the police from the bodies on the pier.

In the case of bodies which seemed easy to identify, the police removed valuables in properly numbered envelopes. But “where the bodies were so utterly incinerated as to make recognition impossible by other than bits of jewelry, the finger rings, necklaces and earrings were not removed,” said the
World
. “Policemen were especially assigned to guard these coffins.”

Outside the clamor to get in rose in waves. To relieve the pressure on First Avenue, the police allowed two lines, four and five abreast, to form down each side of Misery Lane. A rumor spread that the police would open the pier gates at midnight. It threw the people into a “wild hysteria of almost joy,” the
Times
wrote. “Several women had to be taken to Bellevue for treatment, laughing and crying and struggling all the way.”

In an effort to placate the crowd and ease the coming ordeal in the morgue, a policeman walked the length of the waiting lines; at the sound of his voice the people strained toward him, listening:

“Who seeks a girl with a ring bearing the initials G. S.?”

A shriek cuts the air—an old woman breaks out of the line, staggers forward.

“Who seeks a girl whose pay envelope bears the name of Kaplan?”

By 11:30
P.M.
the police in the morgue had “processed” one hundred and thirty-six bodies. “Smiling Dick” Walsh, his face damp where he had wiped away tears, added that of this total fifty-six were burned or crushed beyond physical recognition. Every stitch of clothing on dozens of bodies had been burned off. The body of one girl was headless.

Outside, the thousands stood shivering; the night was cold. Their anguished cries filled the air. Inside, the police, the coroner’s doctors, the superintendent’s little army of disinherited had finished their work.

It was midnight.

The great iron gates swung open.

Now everything grew silent. In the crowd, only a moment ago so anxious to enter, no one stirred.

A policeman called out, “Come on! Come on! It’s all ready now!”

Slowly, an old woman with a shawl over her head started into the pier. All others remained still, their eyes on her. But when she had taken some twenty paces, suddenly the whole crowd moved. Inside the pier, policemen stationed at the coffins began to swing their lanterns over the faces of the dead, for the sputtering arc lights seemed to cast more shadows than illumination.

The little shawled woman moved down the center aisle, leading the crowd. A third of the way down the line she stopped at the coffin numbered 15. She fell to her knees, cried out. The first identification had been made.

Her scream stopped the crowd. Some turned as if to run away. But others pressed forward. Minutes later a dozen had found what they had sought, caught in the spotlight of a policeman’s lantern.

Shivering and weeping, the waiting people were admitted in groups of twenty, each group accompanied by several policemen who almost immediately had their hands full.

The bodies lay in long rows, covered by white sheets, their heads propped on boards so that those passing could more easily make identifications. At first glimpse of the ghastly array, many fainted into the arms of policemen and nurses. Superintendent Yorke’s panhandlers brought them hot coffee.

As soon as an identification was made an officer put the lid on the coffin, tacked onto it a small yellow card on which he wrote the name of the victim, and sent the relatives, with a corresponding slip and name, to the temporary office of the coroner at the side of the pier. Permits to remove the identified bodies were then issued to them.

At one time during that weird morning, the arc lights failed. In the darkness, half-crazed mourners ran about, falling over coffins. Swinging lanterns, as if floating in the air, came to them, carried by nurses or officers ready to help and to pacify. After four minutes, the lights came on again. Six women and two men were found to have fainted.

Small groups would cluster around several of the boxes, seeking for familiar features. For some, recognition was accepted silently with a sinking to the floor or fainting. Many men broke into hoarse sobs, terrible to hear. But with some it was heralded by piercing shrieks, hysterical lamentations in Yiddish or Italian that brought the nurses running and then struggling to pry despairing arms loose from the coffin.

The experienced morgue attendants had arranged the bodies so that those in the worst condition were farthest from the doors. In this way it was thought the hardships for friends and family would be minimized.

Desperate parents moving deeper into the long pier somehow sensed the logic of the arrangement. As they neared the end of the double row of dead, many women became hysterical. The police, thinking that an identification had been made, would start to close the coffin nearest the shrieking woman only to find “they had been misled by the woman’s despair,” said the
Times
.

Dominick Leone of 444 East Thirteenth Street didn’t scream. He came looking for three cousins and a niece, and he walked on tiptoe among the dead, as if fearful of waking them.

But Clara Nussbaum straightened up from the coffin over which she had bent for a moment and ran screaming to the edge of the pier. Captain O’Connor reached her as she was climbing over the barrier below which ran the river and dragged her back. She had recognized her daughter Sadie, eighteen years old. The lower part of Sadie’s body had been almost totally destroyed by the flames.

Commissioner Drummond ordered all the pier openings to be boarded up to prevent any more suicide attempts.

The fainting and the hysterical were taken to the northeast corner of the pier, where Dr. Louis W. Schultz, General Medical Superintendent for the Department of Charities, had set up an emergency hospital. Working with him were the Misses Blair, Robertson, Hamilton, Cook, and Donovan, students from the New York Training School for Nurses; they were all under twenty years old.

They were “a legion in themselves,” said the
Tribune
. “In a scene of such horror and terror, men were glad to have those quiet, gentle-mannered women around. They soothed the terrified, took the arms of the poor, creeping, old mothers.”

The paper told how one nurse stood with her arm around a youngster who had brought a picture of her sister for identification.

“Aren’t you frightened?” the child asked as she shuddered and buried her face in the clean white linen apron.

“Frightened?” came the reply. “No, my little one. Why should we be frightened? The poor things can’t hurt anyone.”

Joseph Miale of 135 Sullivan Street made the circuit of the dead three times.

“I am looking for my sister, Bettina,” he told Captain O’Connor. “She is not here.”

But as he turned to leave the pier, he pointed to one of the bodies and said to O’Connor that it seemed to be the same height as his sister. The Captain drew a ring from the finger of the body. He showed it to Miale who staggered backward, crying, “That is her ring.”

In the first hours after midnight no one came to claim No. 138. She was easy to identify. She was about thirty-seven years old and weighed about 130 pounds. The two policemen who had searched for some means of identification on the body were amazed to find $852 in bills.

The money was pinned inside the left stocking and held fast to the leg by a band of cheese cloth. The two men had first seen a lump inside the woman’s stocking. It was water-soaked and hard, and when they first saw it they thought it was a physical deformity in the leg.

But when they cut away the stocking and the cloth, they found a roll of one, five, and ten-dollar bills. In one of her pockets was a pay envelope with $10. The name on the envelope was Mrs. Rosen.

Her treasure was intact. But Mr. and Mrs. Morris Bierman, of 8 Rivington Street, complained that the body of their daughter, Gussie, had been stripped of three rings, a watch and chain, and earrings. Gussie kept her cash in her shoe and one shoe was missing. The family insisted that the loss was no accident. Gussie’s rings had fitted tightly on her fingers; she habitually wrapped the chain of the pendant watch twice around her neck. The remaining shoe was proof, they said, that the missing one must have been removed by force.

By sunrise, forty-three bodies had been identified. The official recognition accorded the dead was scant. The cards tacked to the boxes read: Anna Cohen, Box No. 31; Celia Eisenberg, Box No. 56; Julia Aberstein, Box No. 32. On the lid of one coffin a strong hand had written with white chalk: “Becky Kessler, call for tomorrow.”

During the early morning, the line of those seeking admission to the pier lengthened, till it stretched from the pier to First Avenue then down from Twenty-sixth Street to Twenty-second Street.

In the afternoon, the character of the crowd began to change. The poorly dressed men and women who had stood in line for hours for the chance to identify a relative were being replaced by more fashionably attired persons.

There were, said the
Sun
, frock-coated young men carrying canes who laughed and chatted with well-dressed girls as the line jostled slowly toward the pier entrance and young couples “who had read the morning papers before starting for their Sunday stroll and who wished to see the dead out of curiosity.”

Five young women, stopped at the entrance by a policeman, brushed him aside and ran into the pier. They were hustled out by other officers.

Once an old woman emerged from the morgue supported by two other women. Her wrinkled face was fixed with a weird grimace, the tears ran down her cheeks, she cried aloud and threw her arms in the air, said the
Tribune
. “And a great boisterous crowd followed her down the avenue, pointing and peering until the police drove them back.”