‘
I had to laugh. I had been looking at some of the theater offerings. After all, this was the heyday of live theater on Broadway. In about twenty years half the theaters would be torn down and some would end up as seedy movie houses into the 1980’s. One of the more famous shows was The Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 with Eddie Cantor. Of all the legendary shows, it was hard to top the Follies every year since 1907, but in Jonathan’s words, “It would not be suitable….” for young children. Besides, some of the real Follies stars were not in this show like Fanny Brice (Funny Girl), Will Rogers, W.C. Fields and Ed Wynn.
That was Wednesday. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we would visit the liners in the harbor. Checking the Times shipping news, the ultra-modern Ile De France would be arriving in the morning with New York’s colorful rascal of a mayor, the dapper Jimmy Walker, and on Wednesday evening the most famous liner of them all, the old Mauretania would sail at 11 pm.
We could visit the Mauretania tomorrow and the Ile De France on Wednesday morning after she is finished unloading. Too bad the Olympic, Titanic’s luckier sister wouldn’t be in port until next Tuesday. That would be interesting, but I had a plan to actually visit the Titanic itself on our next journey through time.
We woke up early Tuesday morning thanks to the noisy city. The Ile was due to dock at around 10 am so I got the kids ready.
“Where are we going to?” Lauren asked.
“We are going to see some really amazing ships today and tomorrow as well as a real Broadway show with ‘Dottie’ tomorrow too, how about that?”
Lauren smiled but Jonathan wasn’t too sure.
“Is Harpo gonna be there?” Lauren asked.
“I don’t know, but we’re going with Dottie anyway.”
Jonathan smiled, I could tell he liked her.
“Come on, it’ll be fun, let’s go.”
LINERS
“Can we go to the movies?” Jonathan asked.
“Sure, but I don’t know if you’re going to like them - they’re silent, no sound - you have to read the ‘titles’ they call them, full screen text between scenes - nobody’s figured out subtitles yet.”
“Yeah, like your Harold Lloyd DVDs, right?” Jonathan replied frowning, remembering those old silent comedy DVDs I had. He was not a fan of the silent movies.
“Yep. But they have been playing around with sound, even color film for a few years. We’ll see. Let’s check the paper when we get back tonight, OK? We should really go to the Roxy Theater. It is a real palace, and no longer exists in our time.”
We walked the short distance to 6th Avenue, pointing out the immense Hippodrome Theater, largest in the world. It hosted circuses and the likes of Houdini some years ago and would fall to the wreckers in 1939. We rode the ancient 6th Avenue El on a pokey local all the way to South Ferry, where I hoped to catch the inbound Ile De France after she cleared quarantine off Staten Island.
About 9 am, we could see the big liner with her three red, blacktopped funnels sailing majestically up the Hudson slowly passing us on lower Manhattan.
“She sure is big, hey?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said, “But what’s the big deal about this ship?”
“She is the newest ocean liner and the first truly modern one, the first with non-traditional interiors, what they call ‘Art Deco,” I explained, “the foundation for all modern design. We’ll take a look at her tomorrow.”
We had a quick breakfast at a lunch counter elbow to elbow with Wall Street types. There was plenty of time to watch her dock at the 15th street pier, nearby the Mauretania on 14th street.
We took a cab up to the ‘modern’ Chelsea Piers, where the French Line pier was crowded with onlookers. It looked decidedly odd to me, without the old elevated West Side Highway, still a few years in the future.
We worked our way through the crowd to the water, and watched as the tugs gently nudged the steel giant into her berth with much puffing and tooting of whistles. The docking pilot on the Ile used his police whistle to communicate with the tugboats. Eventually the liner’s crew tossed over the huge ropes that teams of muscular longshoremen grabbed and made fast to the dock. Me and the kids nearly jumped out of our skins as the Ile’s main ship’s whistle bellowed a shattering blast to indicate the docking was complete.
No point in sticking around to wait for the Mayor to disembark, so we pushed our way through the crowd to Pier 54, where the majestic old campaigner, the Mauretania sat, where the Carpathia docked with Titanic survivors in 1912 and the Mauretania’s near-sister Lusitania sailed to her doom in 1915.
“It looks like Titanic.” Jonathan said excitedly, counting her four funnels.
“Well, a little bit like her, but she is different in so many ways,” I explained.
“The ‘Mary’ as the Mauretania is affectionately known, is a marine legend,” I told them. “Since 1909, the old ship is still the fastest on the Atlantic, and she is also known as the ‘Rostron Express.”
“Why?” they asked.
“She’s called that by her regular passengers because of her captain, Rostron, who rescued Titanic’s passengers when he captained the Carpathia, and because she’s so fast she usually arrives on time to the minute so that the captain can always catch the same train to his home from Southampton.”
We walked up to her riveted steel knife-like prow.
“She looks old, how come she’s so fast?” Jonathan asked skeptically.
“She and her sister Lusitania had the then-radical steam turbine engines and four propellers. Their design was for speed, not for comfort, as you can see how thin she is, even sleek, in spite of those four, tall black-topped red-orange funnels,” I explained.
“They were built to beat the Germans who won the speed contest from the British in 1897, so they wanted to be sure they had the most advanced power plant, and so the ‘Mary’ remains the fastest ship afloat,” I told them. “Let’s go on board.”
They smiled at this.
We entered the rather modern steel pier and found the visitor’s gangway that led to 1st Class, lower ‘promenade’ deck. Paying a small donation of 10 cents each, we walked up the gangway, briefly suspended high above the water between pier and the ship’s riveted black steel flank at a dizzying height, the kids not wanting to look down. We entered the open lower promenade deck. The upper promenade was above us and above that the boat deck with lifeboats nested in pairs, these upper sides a brilliant white, being touched up by a paint crew.
RMS Mauretania - Fastest Liner in the World from 1909 - 1929
Courtesy of Michael Pocock
The kids found the British accents of the crew amusing. We could wander where we pleased so we started in the 1st or as Cunard called it ‘Saloon Class.’ The woodwork was rather dark and the dome over the dining room especially so, designed in a medieval French style. One elegant room gave way to another, 2nd class also elegant but smaller, with its own dome.
There was a slight list, which the kids found odd, the deck wasn’t level, and there was a vibration of the ventilating machinery. She was clearly old, paint thick on chipped steel, teak decks worn smooth, the smell of salt water, steam and oil as well as some tough British antiseptic. The ship was alive, I told the kids, taking on oil, getting ready for sea tomorrow. Even now, bouquets of flowers, baskets of fruit, ‘bon voyage gifts’ were being
