Waiting for word about the Titanic survivors

On the morning of April 15, 1912, at least one New York newspaper carried the grim announcement: the Titanic had sunk. What wasn’t clear for several days, though, was how great the loss of life was.

So anxious New Yorkers with friends and relatives aboard the unsinkable ship went down to the Bowling Green Offices Building at 9 Broadway, which housed the headquarters of the White Star Line.

A crowd outside the building soon grew, spilling over onto the sidewalk and then across Bowling Green. At first, a White Star spokesman assured everyone that the ship was safe.

Then wireless reports began to trickle in. But only when the Carpathia docked on the rainy night of April 18 did people really learn whether their loved ones were safe or if they had gone down with the ship.

The White Star Line is long gone, but their former headquarters remains—now home to a Subway.

Where survivors of the Titanic docked in 1912

If all went according to plan, the R.M.S. Titanic would have pulled into the White Star Line’s Pier 59 off 18th Street at the Hudson River.

But fate intervened. So instead, the 700 or so survivors picked up by the R.M.S. Carpathia docked in New York around nine p.m. on April 18 at Pier 54, the Cunard Line pier, just south of 14th Street.

There they were greeted by thousands of panicked relatives and newspaper reporters, desperate for details on who had survived and what happened to the so-called unsinkable ship.

The lettering is ghostly and faint, but you can still see both company names on this rusted old metal entrance.

Former rivals, the White Star and the Cunard lines merged in the 1930s, trying to stave off bankruptcy.

Pier 54 had another tangle with a maritime disaster. It’s the port where the R.M. S. Lusitania sailed from in 1915 before being torpedoed.

Here it is arriving at Pier 54 in an undated photo. And yep, that’s the infamous Liberty Inn when it was a sailor’s dive known as the Strand Hotel.)