Milestones: December 16, 2023

December 16, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

The tail of the doomed United Airlines jet sits in the middle of 7th Avenue. All 128 passengers ultimately died.
Photo courtesy Municipal Archives, City of New York

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TRAGIC DAY — PARK SLOPE’S 7TH AVENUE BECAME THE SCENE OF A HORRIFIC TRAGEDY ON DEC. 16, 1960, WHEN ONE OF TWO AIRLINERS THAT HAD COLLIDED in a snowstorm, while en route to different NYC airports, fell onto the street, destroying one church, almost damaging another and killing the passengers and people on the ground. A United Airlines flight from Chicago preparing to land at Idlewild Airport in southern Queens (later named after slain President John F. Kennedy), miscalculated a revised approach that the control tower had given it and flew directly into the path of a TWA flight from Dayton, Ohio that was headed to LaGuardia Airport in northern Queens. The TWA flight crashed over New Dorp, Staten Island. The United Flight fell over 7th Avenue, destroying the Pillar of Fire Church and almost hitting St. Augustine Academy one avenue to the west. The 90-year-old caretaker of Pillar of Fire was killed, as were two men selling Christmas trees. The crash also set several apartment buildings on fire. Strewn across 7th Avenue were the wrapped Christmas gifts that the passengers had brought with them.

Initially, the only survivor was 11-year-old Stephen Baltz, on a holiday trip to visit family. He was able to tell reporters what it was like to have been on the plane. However, the next day he, too, succumbed to internal injuries.

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FRACAS IN BOSTON HARBOR — AMERICAN COLONISTS, ANGRY AT THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT OVER THE TAXATION OF GOODS, particularly tea, on Dec. 16, 1773, waged a political act of defiance. The trigger was England’s Tea Act, which was enacted to save the East India Tea Company at the expense of the colonists’ economy. This undercut Dutch tea trading with America. The colonists, disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three British tea ships in a midnight raid and dumped 342 chests of tea, estimated at $18,000, into the harbor after Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused their demand to send the tea back to England. Leading the Tea Party raid was patriot leader Samuel Adams, who had organized the melee with about 60 members of the Sons of Liberty, his underground resistance group. England, angered further by the destruction of its property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, which closed Boston to merchant shipping, established the equivalent of martial law in Massachusetts and made British officials immune from prosecution. The colonists, resisting further, organized the First Continental Congress.

Many of the provisions in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights would later protect citizens against some of the mandates in the Coercive Acts, particularly the quartering of British troops in Americans’ homes.

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BLACK MUSIC AS FOUNDATION — A CZECH COMPOSER WHO LOVED AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSIC GAINED ACCLAIM IN NEW YORK. The Philharmonic Society of New York’s Dec. 16, 1893 World Premiere Carnegie Hall performance Of Czech Composer Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 In E Minor “From The New World” was highly acclaimed. New York Times music critic W.J. Henderson, described the work now known more familiarly as “New World Symphony as “a vigorous and beautiful work” that “must take the place among the finest works in this form produced since the death of Beethoven.” However, Henderson focused more on Dvorak’s unconventional politics and actions and wrote in defense of the composer’s drawing from the African-American folk music tradition. The year prior, Dvorak had become the director of the newly established National Conservatory of Music in New York City, with a salary of $15,000 that was generous for the time. He set out, at the urging of philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, to create a “national music.” While the musical elite in Boston threw contempt on Dvorak’s endeavors, calling him “a negrophile,” New York City’s music lovers and critics alike were very enthusiastic.

Dvorak told the New York Herald in 1893, “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”

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IMPERSONATED AMERICANS — THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE, WHICH BEGAN ON DEC. 16, 1944 and lasted three weeks, was the Germans’ last major campaign of World War II and one of the most catastrophic for the Allied troops. Also called Operation Autumn Mist, the offensive’s goal was to push the Allied front line further westward from France to Belgium, with the Germans creating a “bulge” in the Ardennes forest. Americans suffered high casualties: about 80,000 GIs were either killed or captured, and 40,000 were wounded. Moreover, the Nazis were brutal, with SS soldiers murdering 72 American troops. The German strategy of infiltrating Allied (particularly American) units with previously-captured uniforms and vehicles was very successful, and the Nazis were able to sabotage communications.

This strategy would later play into the 1967 movie, “The Dirty Dozen,” a World War II-themed film about a secret mission for which a ragtag band of military convicts are trained to infiltrate a Nazi headquarters. Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson’s characters, Major John Reisman and Joseph Wladislaw, respectively, are proficient in German and gain access to the palace before having to save the mission.

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A HERO IN THE WILD WEST AND ON STAGE — BUFFALO BILL CODY, WHO HAD BEEN A SCOUT IN AMERICA’S WESTWARD EXPANSION, MADE HIS FIRST STAGE APPEARANCE ON DEC. 16, 1872. William Frederick Cody had already gained a reputation in real life (not just pulp fiction) as a capable and even-keeled fighter of the Wild West. He had worked as a messenger and scout and had fought in 16 battles with Native American tribes, participating in a major victory over the Cheyenne in 1869. Cody got his break as an actor while serving as a hunting guide for prominent members of society who wanted to experience a bit of the “Wild West”: one such explorer was Edward Judson, nom de plume Ned Buntline. He made Cody the hero of a novel that was then staged in Chicago. That play, The Scouts of the Prairie, made him decide to stay in the theatre, where he played a magnified version of himself.

Buffalo Bill stayed in the theatre for more than a decade and became even more famous with the opening of the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1883. The show was still touring when Buffalo Bill Cody died in 1917.

See previous milestones, here.