Tag Archives: 50th anniversary

Civics and Urban Life

Some Random Facts About 1960 Park Slope Crash

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Some random  facts about the 1960 Airline Crash:

–The crash was the deadliest U.S. commercial aviation disaster of its time.

–All 127 passengers and crew on both planes died.

–7 people died, who were on the ground in Park Slope.

–It was the first time that a black box recorder was used to provide details to crash investigators.

–The little boy who survived the crash for 26 hours was named Stephen Baltz.

–10 brownstone apartment buildings, the Pillar of Fire Church, the McCaddin Funeral Home, a Chinese laundry and a delicatessen burned.

–Hollis Frampton, an experimental filmmaker, was scheduled to be on the United flight, but decided not to return to New York that day to see a retrospective by photographer Edward Weston in Minneapolis. Frampton said of this decision that he was “never…able to decide whether Weston tried to kill me, or saved my life.” (from Wikipedia).

Civics and Urban Life

How We Remember: The Park Slope Plane Crash

I try to imagine it: a cold December day in 1960 much like today when two planes collided over Staten Island and one of the planes landed on Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue in Park Slope.

Headlines in the next day’s New York Times’ read: Disaster in Fog. DC-8 plunges into Park Slope Street missing school and 10 Brooklyn houses burn after plane hits a church

134 people (127 passengers and 7 people on the ground) were killed. An 11-year-old boy was found alive. He was brought to Methodist Hospital and died 26 hours later. There’s a plaque in the hospital’s chapel.

That event 50 years ago is a fact of life in Park Slope. A perennial question: “Was that where the plane came down?”

I think of it just about every time I pass that corner, which is often, or sit in Ozzie’s Cafe just a block away.

When a new condo was built on that corner I wondered: how would it feel to live on that site.

Life moves on but something like this is never forgotten. It leaves its imprint on a place, the trace of memory and mourning.

In 1960 the world was not accustomed to the familiar and tragic news of a catastrophic airplane crash. This was the first of its kind, the biggest air crash of its time. It must have been harrowing.

My mother and father came out to Park Slope on that day. They drove out in their little Austin Healey because they wanted to see what had happened in Brooklyn,where my mother was born.

“I saw everything,” she told me yesterday.

“Do you remember any details?” I asked.

“I saw everything,” she said again emphatically.

I’m still not sure what she saw.

My sister and I were only 2-years-old and they left us home in Manhattan. It’s strange to imagine my parents, thirty-somethings, wanting to see for themselves the magnitude of this disaster.

“We wanted to see it,” my mother told me. “Your father and I were like that then,” she said.

Today is the anniversary of that terrible day. People will gather at Green-wood Cemetery to commemorate and remember—they will dedicate a new memorial to those who perished.

I expect there will be makeshift memorials on that corner of Seventh Avenue. Flowers, notes, photographs.

It is how we remember that informs that which we can’t forget.