Sadie Scott and Minnie Rice had been sitting together, and the force of the collision threw Rice partway out a window. Both were trapped by the wreckage. They stayed calm as rescuers worked to free them. “Don’t tell our folks we are much hurt,” one said, as they were finally extracted, before they were taken to the hospital with wounds to their heads and legs.
F.S. Cowdrey, sitting in the second-to-last car, was reading the paper when he heard a tremendous crash and found himself pinned between two shattered seats. He groped his way through a cloud of steam and climbed through a window, then helped two women escape. Young Frank Crosby was not as lucky; he was counted as one of the 15 killed that day. (Two died later of their injuries.) When Crosby’s father, mother and three sisters learned the news at the New Rochelle train station, both parents fainted from the shock.
Around 40 others were injured, some gravely. A recently married couple, William and Amanda Howard, perished in the wreck; their funeral was held in their home, with the caskets placed side by side where the two had stood when they were wed six months before. Amanda’s death had been particularly heartbreaking, as she was alive and being tended to by firefighters when the steam pipe that was trapping her burst and killed her.
All of this was a tragedy foretold, says Kurt C. Schlichting, author of Grand Central Terminal: Railroads, Engineering and Architecture in New York City. “People had been warning for years: There’s going to be an accident. And when it happened, all hell broke loose. People wanted to indict the Vanderbilt family, and they demanded that steam engines in the city be eliminated.”
The tunnel disaster would become a turning point for the nation’s largest city, altering its very geography. Out of the wreckage would emerge, seemingly out of thin air, acres of new buildable land in the heart of the metropolis, which in turn enabled the creation of the storied Park Avenue of today, with the glorious new Grand Central Terminal at its head. And beneath the new land and the terminal, engineers installed a revolutionary train track system that, in time, as it was copied across the country, helped drive the explosive growth of the suburbs, transforming American life for decades.
The ripples of lasting change extended far beyond New York in other ways, supercharging the growing popular backlash against the so-called robber barons, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, who engaged in questionable business practices and amassed huge fortunes while putting profits above their workers’ and customers’ health and safety.