...And 135 Would Be the Number of the Dead

Last night I ordered dinner at Wing Wagon, and while I was waiting noticed a black and white picture of a plane crash, marked 7th ave and Sterling Place... here's the full story:

Pillar of Fire
Recalling the Day the Sky Fell, December 16, 1960

From the article:

Though scars from the crash still can be seen on some of the buildings and a vacant lot remains where Pillar of Fire Church and an apartment house once stood on Sterling Place, few would recognize the quiet intersection as a scene of the nation’s worst aircraft disaster.

Has anyone here seen any marks of the crash?

Once, my mother, husband, and I were doing a book-guided walking tour that mentioned this event. We were standing around looking like touristy idiots, and someone came up to us and asked if we were reading about the crash. Turns out, he had lived around the corner at the time, and was able to point out various things to us. The vacant lot is pretty easy to spot, obviously. IIRC, the plane was making for Prospect Park, and it landed around the middle of that block of Sterling and then skidded east to the intersection with 7th.

PS. This definitely took place on the Park Slope side...possible we should move this thread...

Park Slope scares me.

On a side note... there is an antique store (on 5th I think, I can't remember the name) that has pictures of the crash for sale and copies of the NYT from that day.

Wow, that was a really interesting article. Thanks for sharing!

Here's a related article in today's NYTimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/nyregion/18gone.html

That was a strangely written article.

article wrote: ...and 135 would be the number of the dead.

It's a little overwrought. And what's with the Dostoyevsky non-sequitur?

That is one of the most strangely written articles I've ever read. And, I mean, just bizarre in every aspect. Way to wring two pages out of absolutely no information:

In the 1959 Brooklyn telephone directory, behind a stately cover portrait of the library at Grand Army Plaza, Mr. Moy listed his home number, MAin 2-1446, at the shop's address, 26 Seventh Avenue. There he was on the page below Elsie Moxter from Shore Parkway.

"I didn't go to the Chinese place," said Robert M. Nevin, who in 1960 lived at 126 Sterling Place, around the corner from the laundry. "I used a different tailor."

So...you could have skipped this paragraph, right?

This may be the dumbest Times article I've ever read, and that's saying something.

I mean...I'm just at a loss. This article is so bad as to almost make me love it in a cult worst-article-ever kind of way.

It's essentially two pages of overwrought prose about...a Chinese laundry guy who moved to Manhattan after a plane crashed in his Brooklyn neighborhood. I mean, why would it even occur to anyone to WRITE this article, to say nothing of printing it. "The Man Who Walked Away"? You mean some guy who moved? Like thousands of people in this city do every day?

What I want to know is what this reporter was on when he conceived and wrote this.

Plus, was that substance supplied by the NYT, or did he obtain it himself?

I sexed up the post title in honor of our newfound object of ridicule.

Good call! I think I might need that on a T-shirt.

A year or so ago (don't remember when exactly) the Sunday Times had a long article about the crash, the boy who survived and the nurse who was with him at Methodist. She was a young woman and a Park Slope local and it was very nicely written about the neighborhood in those days, the tragedy of the crash and its effect on the people in Park Slope. I don't know whether its available in the archives.