The deadliest subway crash in NYC history started with a $20 bonus offer
More than 90 died in one of the America’s worst train wrecks
Edward Luciano was already 11 hours deep into his shift as a subway motorman for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) when he agreed to an appealing offer: a $20 bonus and a raise to take one more route, a rush hour train to Brighton Beach. The decision would cost at least 93 people — perhaps as many as 102 — their lives.
For in one fateful moment, at 6:42 p.m. on November 1, 1918, running the route from Park Row to Coney Island, Luciano’s train barreled along at 30 miles an hour along a six-mile-an-hour curve. This sent his train off the rails as it entered a tunnel overpass by Malbone Street, crashing into the concrete partition. It was not only the deadliest train accident in the history of the New York City subway, but one of the worst railway disasters ever in America.
As is often the case, this devastating and severe accident was made possible by a constellation of misfortunes and mishaps. The day of the accident — the first of the month of November — corresponded with the start of the strike of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The strike followed Brooklyn Rapid Transit company’s ousting of 29 employees who began organizing. The day before, New York City mayor John Francis Hylan, himself a former BRT employee (he was fired for operating his train recklessly) and labor sympathizer, told the transit company that all motormen on elevated and subway lines voted for a strike effective at 5 a.m.
In the days of private ownership of New York City transportation, strikes were not uncommon. The trains still ran the next day, and nonunion company employees scrambled to fill positions. One such worker was a train dispatcher, 23-year-old Edward Luciano, who went by the name of Anthony Lewis to dodge anti-Italian prejudice. He was in less than ideal condition for a long day; he was weak after recently recovering from the Spanish flu, and only a few days prior his infant daughter perished from the epidemic.
Luciano began his shift at five in the morning on November 1. He was to be a motorman of a five-car train to shuttle between downtown Manhattan and south Brooklyn. Ideally, before driving an occupied train, an apprentice was to shadow a motorman for 60 hours, but no such education was available to fill-ins the day after the strike. Before boarding, Luciano was given a two-hour training session. Aside from some work operating trains in the yard, he had no experience as a motorman, and had never operated a locomotive on a full, passenger-bearing route.
Yet for all his inexperience, Luciano successfully operated his route from Park Row on the Manhattan side of Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island for an entire shift. Then, as rush hour on that Friday began, his supervisor at Culver Depot in Brooklyn requested he run one more route, this time on an entirely new line to Brighton Beach. Luciano accepted the task, and the extra pay that went with it.
The green motorman’s incompetence was not all there was to blame on the astounding carnage of accident. He was not responsible for being given dangerous wooden train cars with steel undercarriages, nor was he at fault that four of the five were made before 1889.
Proving most unfortunate was that the arrangement of the train cars stood in clear violation of BRT engineering standards. The five-car train consisted of three motor cars and two trailer cars. Regulations dictated that the lighter trailer cars not be attached to each other to achieve more even mass and power distribution. Yet at the time of the accident, the cars were arranged from front to back; motor, trailer, trailer, motor, and motor. That these two trailer cars — where most of the injuries and deaths occurred — were put in sequence was perhaps the result of untrained assembly the morning of the strike.
Luciano’s final route was heavily scrutinized in his manslaughter trial five months later. The first sign of trouble occurred at Sands Street, the first stop after crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, when his train overshot the platform. Charles Darling, a train passenger, got a quick sense there was trouble. “I was sitting in the front car of the train,” he said, “directly behind the motorman’s box. I realized as soon as we left Park Row that something was the matter. The car started and stopped with sharp jolts and jerks and it ran around the curve at Sands Street at a speed I considered dangerous.” Other survivors recalled similar feelings, and it’s possible some concerned passengers abandoned the train before their stops.
Shortly after bungling the Sands Street stop, Luciano bypassed a switch and continued on a track in the wrong direction. This involved coordinating with a dispatcher to maneuver the train, including putting it in reverse, to set it back on course for Brighton Beach.
This effort caused an eight-minute delay, and it’s believed Luciano then sped up to compensate for the lost time. The motorman was now on unfamiliar and difficult tracks. From the Park Palace stop in Crown Heights to Malbone Street where the accident occurred, there is a 70-foot downgrade that required careful navigating to keep suitable speed for the six-mile-per-hour “s” curve ahead. He made one more mistake: despite signal calls for a stop at Consumer’s Square, he blew right through it.
The tunnel was now 15 seconds away.
Going 30 miles per hour over a delicate curve, the first car derailed a few feet before entering the tunnel. It barreled into the concrete partition separating the northbound and southbound tracks, and was sent at an angle across the train rails, where the second plunged into it.
“Packed together as if in a box without structural strength to give them any protection, the passengers in the first car were crushed and cut to pieces,” said the New York Times. The partition was at its base a concrete divider, with steel pillars above to support the overpass. The second and third cars crashed sideways into these steel girders, cutting into the cars. Passengers slammed against the girders, the impact “striking the heads of some from their bodies.” One man had been impaled by a broken rod of iron from the undercarriage, which in the crash had sprung upward into his torso.
The second and third cars, where the most severe bloodshed happened, had tumbled on their sides. They were at a moderately high rush hour capacity at the time. “Passengers were heaped upon another,” reports said, “some dead, some dying, some slightly injured and some hurt, but so tightly gripped in the wreckage and so menaced by wooden and steel splinters, that movement was impossible.” Some of the deceased showed no mortal wounds, suggesting they met their end by suffocation. Passengers in the rear two cars, which did not derail, faced better odds of survival. Still, having been packed tightly in the car, nearly all incurred minor injuries and bruises from being thrown from their seats or dashed against the walls or other standing passengers.
Because of the location of the incident, it was some 15 to 20 minutes before authorities and rescuers were called, and a rescue effort began only after about 45 minutes. Throngs assembled around the rescue effort and were kept back by reinforcements. Priests arrived to deliver last rites. Surgeons stitched up wounds by the light of lanterns in the tunnel. Charles Ebbets Jr. feared his father, who owned the Brooklyn Dodgers, might have been caught in the wreck, and was relieved when news came that he wasn’t. He opened up nearby Ebbets Field where volunteer surgeons treated about 50 patients with minor injuries.
Luciano was found at his home by authorities around one o’clock in the the next morning . According to the New York Times, “He was seated in a chair, as pale as death.” He had no recollection of how he left the wreckage unscathed, and remembered little of how he got there, supposing at one point he took a trolley.
In the wake of the tragedy, engineers suspended the strike. Five months afterward, Luciano and four BRT officials were put on trial for manslaughter. None were convicted, but the BRT met a steady dissolution following expensive lawsuits to the families of the deceased and to the maimed and injured. Malbone Street, where it happened, was thereafter named Empire Boulevard to separate it from the disaster.
In terms of lessons learned, New York City implemented laws preventing wooden cars from being used in underground service. There was also a renewed effort to provide dead-man’s controls to mitigate the possibility of a disaster if a motorman is incapacitated, falls asleep, dies, or perhaps in Luciano’s case, is for some other reason reluctant to respond.
In regard to Luciano, after his acquittal, he appears to have moved to Long Island, joined the real estate business, and disappeared from the record. When he was asked previously why he had taken on a job he was clearly unqualified for, he replied flatly, “A man has to make a living.”
