100 Years Ago, the Titanic Disaster Captivated New York City 100 Years Ago Titanic A disaster at sea and its reverberations in New York. New York, the city, knew all about the Titanic before the problem with New York, the ship. The Titanic - the largest passenger ship the world had ever seen, and the most unbelievably and unapologetically opulent - was an event before it was an event, and New York had read all about it in progress reports on the positioning of the stern frame, in accounts of its launching and in short paragraphs about brief test runs. And then, as it left Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage, it yanked the New York from its moorings. This was four days before the problem with the iceberg. "The great Titanic drew the New York toward her as an iron filing is drawn to a magnet," The New York Times reported. The Times said the Titanic's smug passengers lined the decks and watched the New York bob in the water after its hawsers snapped, "laughing with pride that they were aboard such a ship." As the world commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, New York's fascination continues, for the Titanic was the kind of defining event in the early 20th century that the 9/11 attacks were in the early 21st. "It was completely shocking, because what was known immediately, or almost immediately, was the magnitude of the disaster," said Steven Biel, the author of "Down With the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster," "and part of what immediately gave it a huge impact on the consciousness of New York was some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in New York were on that ship. These people were in the news already. People ate up stories about the Astors and the other people in first class on that ship. For New York, the port that the Titanic never reached, there was more to identify with than doomed boldface names. "My guess is it was the kind of story like airplane crashes," the architectural historian Mosette Broderick said. Everyone puts themselves for a second into the position of identifying with people in the boat. Everyone thought, "Thank God it's not me," so there was a way you managed to cope with the coverage." It was simply "not possible" to have been in New York in 1912 and been unaware of the doomed Titanic, said Paul Heyer, the author of "Titanic Century: Media, Myth and the Making of a Cultural Icon." Crowds filled the streets outside newspaper offices - and outside the Lower Manhattan base of the Titanic's owner, the White Star Line - but there was little to add to the basic outline: An iceberg that was too close and noticed too late, a collision that was little more than a bump, a flood that overran the vaunted watertight compartments. New York had had its share of disasters. Eight years earlier, the General Slocum, a steamboat on a charter run to a church picnic, exploded and sank in the East River between Queens and the Bronx. More than 1,000 people died. Carlos F. Hurd, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who was aboard the ship that rescued Titanic survivors, compared the Titanic catastrophe to the General Slocum explosion as well as the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. "They shrink to local events in comparison with this world catastrophe," he wrote. He was not the only one who immediately understood the Titanic's significance. "If we could ask someone in 1912 if they thought the sinking would be remembered a century later," Dr. Heyer said, "they most probably would have said yes. At the time, it was referred to as "the story of the century," and apart from war coverage, it remains possibly the second biggest single-event news story of the 20th century, after the assassination of J.F.K." And nowhere was the Titanic more personal or more poignant than in New York. The victims included well-known New Yorkers like Isidor Straus, who owned Macy's department store with his brother, and John Jacob Astor IV, who, The Times said, had "put up and owned more hotels and skyscrapers than any other New Yorker." New Yorkers would have felt a connection to other victims, like Washington A. Roebling II of Trenton, the grandson of the engineer who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. "Even for those who didn't have a direct personal connection to the disaster," he said, "there was an enormous outpouring of grief." The focus was on Pier 54, at West 14th Street, where the Carpathia, the passenger ship that had picked up more than 700 Titanic survivors, was due on April 18, a Thursday. "Never before had the arrival of one ship been the focus of so much anticipation and speculation," wrote Steve Turner in "The Band That Played On." Limousines and touring cars sped so quickly down the newly asphalted Seventh Avenue that many of them slipped on its rainy surface and found themselves running into the curbs. The maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham said there was a "monumental traffic jam" near West 14th Street, something the Carpathia would not have rated under any other circumstances. Mr. Maxtone-Graham described the Carpathia as a "workaday Cunarder," smaller and less glamorous than the Titanic. Even though roughly half of the Carpathia's cabins were empty, "passage to Manhattan involved considerable discomfort" once the Titanic passengers came aboard, Mr. Maxtone-Graham wrote in "Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner." The lucky ones among Titanic passengers were "doubled or tripled up in staterooms," he wrote. The unlucky ones were "camped out in public rooms or packed into overtaxed crew cabins." To greet them on a night of slashing rain - and contain a crowd estimated at 30,000 people, with 10,000 more jamming the streets around the Battery - the city mobilized 200 police officers, some on horseback. Mayor William J. Gaynor did not wait with them. He was in the harbor, on a tugboat, when the Carpathia sliced through the fog. "The mayor's tug let out a whistle blast, quickly followed by the toots, bells and sirens of every other boat in the harbor," the historian Wyn Craig Wade wrote in "The Titanic: End of a Dream." "At the pier, rich men, poor men stood shoulder to shoulder, all of them united in the hope of seeing the faces of those they loved," Mr. Wade wrote. People at the pier began weeping quietly. There was no hysteria; everyone remained in control. Cunard wanted a fast turnaround for the Carpathia after the Titanic's passengers had disembarked, and scheduled a departure for 4 p.m. the next day. Mr. Maxtone-Graham wrote that it, too, became a tourist attraction. "Hordes of curious New Yorkers descended on the vessel," he wrote. They knew no passengers, they just wanted to set foot aboard Carpathia and poke their noses into the empty wireless shack. The place where the messages from the Titanic had been picked up.