Titanic: The Exhibition

Post written by Christa Avampato. You can follow Christa on Twitter.

Today I went to the Titanic Exhibition at the Discovery Times Center, located in the old New York Times building on 44th Street. The exhibit tells the story of the Titanic through items salvaged from the wreckage, eye-witness accounts, and scientific exploration. I found it to be equal parts fascinating and terrifying.
Around every corner I was surprised by some new fact I never knew:
1.) Titanic was only two days away from its final destination (New York City) when it hit the iceberg.
2.) The iceberg made 5 small cuts in the hull of the ship, causing 5 chambers to flood. If only 4 chambers flooded, the ship likely would have stayed afloat.
3.) Captain Edward John Smith planned to retire immediately after the voyage, having risen up out of poverty as a potter’s son.
4.) Most passengers aboard the Titanic were not the wealthy elite (though there were a good number of them as well.) Most were people emigrating to the U.S. to build a better life for themselves and their families.
5.) Margaret (Molly) Brown was a passenger aboard Titanic, and her survival of the voyage helped her earn the nickname the Unsinkable Molly Brown.
6.) The last surviving passenger, Millvina Dean, passed away on May 31, 2009.
7.) Though Titanic sunk if 1912, nothing was salvaged from the wreckage until 1981.
8.) Artifacts from the wreck can be preserved though there is currently no technology available to salvage the boat itself. At 6,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, scientists believe that Titanic will implode and disintegrate in 40-90 years at the bottom of the ocean.
9.) The first few lifeboats left Titanic with barely anyone on them because so many passengers considered it inconceivable that anything could ever sink the Titanic. They chose to just stay aboard the ship rather than flee.
10.) 3 hours lapsed between the time Titanic hit the iceberg and when it was completely submerged. 700 people lived through the night aboard the lifeboats.
Towards the end of the exhibit, there is a block of ice you can touch that shows how cold the seawater was that night of the crash. As someone who doesn’t swim that well (I didn’t learn to swim until I was 30) and has an immense fear of drowning (truly, I cannot think of a worse fate), touching that block of ice made me wince.
It’s eerie to walk among the belongings of the passengers. It is at times uncomfortable to see someone’s eyeglasses, pocket watch, and change purse, knowing that they were ordinary people like us and suffered such a cruel fate. I cannot imagine how frightening it must have been to be on board Titanic, watch it break in half, and then completely fall away into the abyss.
The strong emotion and compassion viewers feel is a testament to the talent of the curators of the exhibit.
What struck me most about the story of Titanic were the letters and the stories of survival and heroism:

One woman was so convinced that something could go wrong that she insisted on purchasing travel insurance. She was originally told by the White Star Line, the company that owned Titanic, that insurance wasn’t necessary because the ship was virtually unsinkable;

The man who was shanghaied the night before boarding the Titanic after a two year long trek around the world, and forced to work as a laborer on a ship bound for the Far East. He eventually escaped the ship while it was docked in Egypt and made his way to Buffalo, New York; his friend who boarded Titanic with his belongings perished;

A priest offered to stay behind so that he could pray along with those of many faiths who would certainly die that evening;

The wives who chose to remained with their husbands on board the ship, because the thought of living without their husbands was a far worse fate than getting aboard a lifeboat and leaving their husbands alone to suffer their certain death.

The Titanic exhibit is an immersive experience, literally and figuratively. Viewers descend downward into the exhibit throughout their journey, eventually ending up in the hull of a ship. Whole rooms are recreated. There are dramatic sound effects and lighting throughout. The audio tour include accounts by survivors and we learn about the painstaking conservation work that makes the exhibit possible.

It’s truly a way to relive history.

Tagged as: Christa Avampato, History