American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [160]
Just a few miles away, on Central Avenue in Jersey City, the very same explosion threw two-and-a-half-month-old Arthur Tossen from his bed. Unlike Raceta, little Arthur did not survive. He died from shock.
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jewish immigrants were jolted from their sleep by the explosion and streamed out of their tenements in panic and fear. Amid the chaos, a young mother named Dveire, who had recently escaped the war in Russia, calmly took her family into the cellar of their East Broadway tenement to ride out the confusion. Accustomed to the noise of battle, Dveire stayed calm, but many of her neighbors did not, as the sounds of shells exploding in New York Harbor made them fear that war had followed them to the New World.
Throughout the New York metropolitan area and extending as far south as Philadelphia, people were awakened by what they thought was an earthquake. Residents of northern Maryland called their local police to complain. But this was no earthquake.
The epicenter of the explosion that had disturbed the sleep of so many people was a place called Black Tom Island. Though once a small island in New York Harbor, Black Tom had since been connected with the mainland of New Jersey by landfill, making it a peninsula that jutted out nearly a mile into the harbor. Piers and warehouses were built along its shoreline and railroad tracks connected them to points west.
A fire had started sometime after midnight on board one of the barges docked at the National Dock and Storage Company’s facility at Black Tom. Dozens of these boats were lined up along the piers at Black Tom, while locomotive cars waited at the terminal, their contents to be loaded onto those boats the following Monday. Some were filled with sugar and tobacco, but most were stocked with dynamite, ammunition, shells, and other tools of war headed for Britain, Russia, and France.
Two hours after it began, the fire eventually reached one of the ships filled with munitions, setting off the great explosion that had awakened so many people for miles around. For three hours after the first blast, more explosions followed and the fire spread to other ships. Huge towers of flames lit the early morning sky. Shrapnel dug huge pits in the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, some two hundred yards from Black Tom.
Thousands of windows in the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan were blown out; the buildings looked as if “they had been targets for scattering handfuls of rocks from some great giant.” The Brooklyn Bridge swayed. Smoldering embers continued to explode shells as late as twenty-four hours after the first explosion, causing firemen and others surveying the wreckage to duck for cover. Twelve people in Manhattan were taken to local hospitals to be treated for cuts from shattered glass.
Almost the entire Black Tom facility was reduced to rubble. Warehouses became piles of large splinters, stacked almost a hundred feet in the air. Railroad cars from the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company were now burning hulks. Rails that helped speed goods to the dock were now gnarled and twisted pieces of metal pointing in all directions. Six piers had become smoking ruins, along with thirteen warehouses, eighty-five fully loaded railroad cars, and over one hundred barges.
The explosion was felt on Ellis Island, just a few hundred yards northeast of Black Tom. The New York Times described it in the wake of the blast as “a war-swept town.” Almost every window on the island was shattered by the concussive effect of the explosions. Shrapnel and other debris were strewn across the island. The terra-cotta ceiling of the main hospital had caved in. The iron-bound door of the main building was jammed inward, as if hit by a direct dynamite blast. An Ellis Island doctor, watching the fire on Black Tom, was thrown fifteen feet against a wall by the power of the blast.
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