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A Shipwreck in Chicago: The Disaster of the SS Eastland

On the chilly early morning of July 24th 1915 the south bank of the Chicago River was bustling with activity. Young men dressed in their Sunday best and the ladies arrived in long dresses, hats, and boots in eager anticipation of the activities ahead. The yearly picnic for the employees of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works (located in present-day Cicero) was a huge event for the company with the hard workers, their families, and friends taking a day off from their grueling work week for fun and relaxation. Thousands arrived that morning, but hundreds of people never left.

In the early 1900s a standard work week was typically six days long and well exceeded forty hours so when the picnics first began for Western Electric employees, they were an instant success. Washington Park, located across Lake Michigan in Michigan City, Indiana was a idyllic setting for the event offering merry-go-rounds, a roller coasters, bandstands, a baseball park, beaches, and picnic grounds alongside tranquil wooded sections for calmer conversational relaxation. The ticket prices ranged from $.75 to $1.00, not a small fee in those days, but to those buying it was well worth it and that year ticket sales hit an all time high with over 7,000 sold.  For many people the picnic was the social event of the year, they would not have missed it for the world.

Enjoying the beach at Washington Park.

In order to get the employees and their guests across Lake Michigan Western Electric chartered five excursion boats, one of which was the SS Eastland, the “Speed Queen of the Great Lakes.” The ship had already been in the hands of several owners and had even been the scene of a mutiny in 1903 when six of the ship’s firemen refused to tend to the fires because they had been denied potatoes with their meals. Despite its colorful past there was no reason for anyone to feel nervous boarding the Eastland. Earlier in the year the federal Seamen’s Act was passed requiring all passenger ships to be retrofitted with a complete set of lifeboats, a move partially enacted because of the tragedy of the Titanic only three years earlier. On July 2nd 1915, just under three weeks before the picnic, the owners of the Eastland complied with the new regulations and added three lifeboats and six rafts all weighing approximately fourteen tons to its top deck. By all appearances the vessel was the safest ship in the world. That morning it was also the most desirable ship to be on because it was scheduled to leave the dock first. Boarding the "Speed Queen" began at 6:30am and people rushed onto the decks at a rate of fifty people per minute in anticipation of a 7:30am departure. The 2,500 passenger limit was soon reached and excited picnic goers began to stake claims on their spots for the boat ride. Due to the light rain many women and children went to the lower decks while others went to the top deck where they gazed over the railings and called to friends down below. Music from a band drifted out from the main cabin beckoning people to dance and begin their festivities early.

The festivities never did begin, because they never had the chance to.

The SS Eastland docked in Ohio circa 1911

The tilting of the Eastland began just after 7am but initially it did not alarm those already on board. At first it was able to right itself, the problem was that tilting did not stop there. The ship was listing toward the port side (the left-hand side of a vessel facing forward) and passengers were asked to disperse and move to the starboard side (the right-hand side of a vessel facing forward) but they did not follow these directions. At 7:20am water began to pour onto the main deck and engines were ordered to stop. However, departure was still not called off as the ship was able to again right itself. Minutes later the tilting resumed and despite being ordered to move to the starboard side passengers still refused due to rain making the desk slippery. The captain of the Eastland, Captain Harry Pedersen, still did not call off the departure, instrad ordering a standby. By 7:27am the listing resumed with the ship tilting away from the dock at a forty-five degree angle, only this time it did not right itself.

The jovial scene only moments before quickly disintegrated into chaos. Dishes began falling off of shelves, the refrigerator behind a bar crashed over pinning passengers underneath, water began to pour onto the ship and the piano on the promenade deck was thrown to the other side of the room crushing two people. Realizing the imminent disaster passengers began to scream and run toward staircases that would become deathtraps in a matter of seconds. Passengers were suddenly whisked off their feet and found themselves inexplicably falling, crashing into other people and anything else in between them and the floor which had been a wall only a moment earlier. The piles of bodies grew and were added to by the tables, chairs, bottles, lunches, and garbage that no longer had anything to hold them upright. Those who were on the top decks wondered if they should jump, and some of them did.

At 7:30am the SS Eastland rolled over in place, coming to rest on it’s side on the muddy bottom of the Chicago River submerging the port side and trapping hundreds of people in twenty feet of cold, murky water. It was only feet from the dock with its ropes still attached.

The disaster happened so fast that none of the new lifeboats were launched, no life jackets were handed out, and no life rafts were utilized simply because passengers did not even have the time to react to the sudden danger they found themselves in. Horrified onlookers, some of which were other picnic goers still waiting to board a ship, began to help in any way they could and people began to jump into the river that had transformed into a frantic screaming sea. Nearby boats hurried to the scene and onlookers began to throw ladders and shipping crates into the water for people to hold onto. To those still trapped in the non-submerged portion of the ship, salvation came in the form of welders who ran to the site and were able to cut holes into the hull with their torches giving people a way out. Bystanders dragged people out of portholes in hopes of saving them from suffocation and those still on the visible portions of the ship scrambled to the dock with some being able to simply walk across the now-horizontal side of the ship to safety.

People standing on the side of the Eastland waiting to be rescued. Image via Smithsonian Magazine.

Being pulled from the capsized ship.

The SS Eastland on its side in the Chicago River.

While there was hope for a percentage of passengers, there was nothing that could be done for those that were trapped inside the ship underwater and the result was absolutely devastating. Nearly everyone that was on the port side of the ship when it tipped was doomed. 844 people lost their lives in the Eastland disaster including 228 teenagers and 22 entire families.Many were lost by drowning but just as many lives were snuffed out by suffocation.

In the days following the disaster the magnitude of the event and the loss became apparent all over the city. Surrounding buildings became morgues and makeshift hospitals where frantic family members circulated desperate for word of their missing loved ones or hoping to finally find a familiar body among the dozens lined up in rows. The tight-knit communities of Polish, Czech and Hungarian immigrants who worked for Western Electric began to drape their homes in black while preparing the so many unexpected funerals. The first week was dedicated to burying the dead with families being given assistance in arranging and paying for the burials. The bells seemed to never stop ringing, the local churches had multiple funerals for days, and funeral processions became a constant sight.

St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church overwhelmed by funerals. Image via OriginalShipster.com.

When the initial shock began to fade it was only replaced by countless questions of what happened that day on the SS Eastland. The answer was simple, the ship was too top heavy to support the passengers and as a result it tipped over. The explanations as to how the ship ended up in the position to tip over with thousands of people on board were not as easy to accept.

The fact of the matter was that the Eastland had a long unstable history. Built in 1902, it was originally constructed to carry produce and only up to 500 people. The design of the ship was top heavy and relied on ballast tanks to keep it balanced but repeated modifications in order to increase passenger space and speed made it unstable when being loaded or unloaded. All inspections were done only when the ship was traveling, making it seem stable and earning it multiple safety certifications. 1904 and 1906 saw two extremely close calls with the Eastland nearly tipping over, each time with over 2,500 people on board. When the ship was bought by  the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company in 1914 the only thing that crossed their minds was how much of a bargain they were getting by only paying $150,000 for the vessel. Tragically, the final straw in the unsettling of the Eastland may have been the retrofitting of the life boats required by the federal Seamen’s Act which added thousands of pounds to its top decks.

A few days after the disaster of the Chicago River a coroner’s inquest questioned an official of the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company who remarked “I didn’t know much about the boat except that we got it at a bargain. All I do is sign blank checks.”

The Eastland being righted after the disaster

Despite the cause being somewhat agreed upon, many still felt someone needed to take the blame for what happened that day. Although it was widely agreed that Captain Harry Pedersen and other crew members were negligent, they were never prosecuted along with officers from the steamship company who also avoided legal action. The hammer seemed to fall on chief engineer Joseph Erickson who was blamed for mishandling the ballast tanks and failing to right the Eastland as it tilted away from the dock. Erickson died during the long proceedings putting the question of fault to rest with him. More than 800 wrongful death lawsuits were filed but the proceedings dragged for more than twenty years with families getting almost nothing in return.

It was not until 1990 that the city of Chicago placed a memorial plaque dedicated to the Eastland disaster on the site. The plaque was stolen but replaced and rededicated on July 24, 2003.Today, at the corner of West Wacker Drive and North LaSalle Street the five foot tall black marker stands silent, often being swallowed up by the bustling city around it. When someone stops to read it, it has a story to tell that sounds unbelievable. A shipwreck, called “Chicago’s Titanic”, that took over 800 lives and happened only feet from dry land.

The marker for the Eastland disaster. Photograph by Victorgrigas on Wikimedia (Creative Commons).

Remarkably, in 2015 a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago discovered previously unknown video footage taken of rescue efforts of the disaster. That footage can be viewed here.

Please do take some time to look at the official website of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society for much more amazing information, stories, and images from this disaster. Click here to go directly to their site.

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Sources:

www.EastlandDisaster.org

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-killed-more-passengers-titanic-and-lusitania-why-has-it-been-forgotten-180953146/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-eastlanddisaster-story-story.html