Crash of the Century
In 1918, a horrific train wreck wiped a Brooklyn street off the map, and changed the city’s subway system forever.
At the unassuming corner of Flatbush and Ocean Avenues, where the greenery of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden abuts a Wendy’s in a drab stretch of Crown Heights, if you look over a low stone wall and through the chain link and trees, you can see a curve of train track making a sharp jog into a tunnel. If you had been standing on this spot in the crisp night air, just after seven p.m. on November 1, 1918, you would have been part of a large, anxious crowd. And had you been able to push to the front, you would have witnessed a single man exiting the tunnel alone. He was a businessman who lived in Brooklyn, along the Brighton Beach train line. It was a Friday night, and he had been traveling home for a weekend of rest. His mind had likely been occupied not only with his work but also the impending peace in Europe—an imminent end to the carnage of World War I was beginning to brighten the newspaper headlines.
But that night he emerged “almost divested of clothing,” wrote The New York Times. Staggering forward nearly naked, “his coat and trousers…ripped from him; he had only one shoe, and was without hat, collar, and tie.” As he stumbled closer, you would see that he was gravely hurt, that “his face was bleeding from many gashes and his left arm was useless,” dangling from his shoulder.
The 1918 subway wreck violently ended the lives of over a hundred people, halted a transit labor strike, changed a young mayor’s career, and pushed one of New York’s last private transit companies into bankruptcy. It was so devastating that the name Malbone, after that night, could no longer be stomached in Brooklyn–the signs for Malbone Street were torn down and replaced with signs reading “Empire Boulevard.”
Here is the story of the lead up and the wreck:
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