SS Eastland Disaster Site

On a calm July morning in nineteen fifteen, a passenger steamship rolled over and sank right here, still tied to the dock, in water barely twenty feet deep. The Eastland was loading more than two thousand factory workers and their families for a company picnic across the lake when it began listing from side to side, then kept going until it rolled completely onto its side in the Chicago River. Eight hundred forty four passengers and crew drowned, many of them trapped below deck or crushed under furniture and each other as the boat went over. More people died on the Eastland that morning than died among the passengers of the Titanic three years earlier.

The cruelest detail is how the deaths connect to that other, more famous disaster. After the Titanic sank in nineteen twelve, Congress passed a law requiring passenger ships to carry enough lifeboats for everyone aboard, a direct response to the hundreds who had drowned for lack of a seat in a boat. Shipowners complied by bolting heavy new lifeboats and rafts onto the Eastland's upper deck. The Eastland was already a known tipsy boat, with a documented history of listing badly even when it was nearly empty, because of design changes made years earlier to its engines and hull that had never been fully corrected. Adding thousands of pounds of lifeboats far above the waterline made an already unstable ship even more top heavy than before. The safety measure written into law specifically to prevent another Titanic helped sink a ship that never even made it out of the dock. No one aboard the Eastland that morning ever had the chance to use a single one of those lifeboats.