The scene at 7th Ave & Sterling Place, Brooklyn on May 2, 2025.
This Spring on a the morning of May 2, my spouse had stepped out for an errand, and called back to say that there was a fire at 7th Ave & Sterling Place, and I might want to have a look. This got my attention; she knew about my keen interest in this block.
7th & Sterling… the intersection marking a 1960 airplane disaster where the tail of a United Airlines jet was photographed for newspapers across the country, where where a young boy named Stephen Baltz fell from the plane into a snowbank to survive just one more night, where the fuselage of a DC8 crashed into the ironically named the Pillar of Fire church, destroying it and several buildings, ending lives of the other passengers and six neighborhood people on the ground including the church’s caretaker, a dentist walking his dog and two sidewalk Christmas tree salesmen. A lot had happened there.
Photo in Cousin John’s bakery.
As my spouse and I met up, we ran into our landlord Greg at the corner of 7th & Sterling who looked at the throng of emergency vehicles and knowingly proclaimed, “always this corner!”
Photos: Dave Anderson. The same corner on May 2, 2025.
My experience with the block
I had my own history with the block before I learned anything about the 1960 disaster. I had walked the block often in my first two years living in the neighborhood when, one morning in December 2013, I was stopped in the crosswalk at 7th & Park Place by a bus driver, asking me to check on a motionless man she had spotted slumped in a van. I discovered the man inside had apparently died of carbon monoxide poisoning while serving as the night watchman for a Christmas tree market on the corner. Having sat alone with my father in hospice just the previous month while he passed away, I was not afraid to help the deceased. I called 911 and greeted the Fire Department paramedics and police, later learning that the man, named Malik, was an immigrant from Africa.
Later that winter, while walking on the same block between Park Place and Sterling, a woman cried out for help, having just slipped on sidewalk ice and injured her lower leg near an entrance to Oceans 8 Billiards. At her request, I once again called 911 and waited for the paramedics to arrive. Coincidentally, Oceans 8 had been the site of a bowling alley that served as a makeshift morgue after the 1960 plane crash.
By the following Spring I had learned about the history of the Park Slope plane crash, and was surprised that I hadn’t heard about it sooner.
May’s neighborhood fire
Fortunately the 2025 fire had not caused any loss of life, but the blaze at 118 Sterling Place brought over a hundred emergency workers to the neighborhood surrounding 7th & Sterling. Crowds gathered in the street to watch the fire’s extinction from the opposite side of the street, many of them standing near the original location of Pillar of Fire church. I wondered, how many of them know the history of this block?
Crowds gather May 2 to watch FDNY put out an apartment fire.
Did they know that the very building where the fire ladders rested on May 2 had been damaged by the United plane’s wing in 1960 (as you can see an archived photo here)? Subsequent removal of 126 Sterling’s cornice made an ideal resting spot for ladders seeking roof access to a building two doors away.
The building supporting ladders was damaged by a plane wing in the 1960 crash. The red brick structure at left replaced a crash-destroyed brownstone.
How could most residents of the neighborhood know about a local tragedy that hasn’t been visibly memorialized? Fifty years after the crash, a memorial was finally erected in Public Lot 38325 of Greenwood cemetery, honoring these victims and additional souls from a TWA Super Constellation that collided with the DC8 and crashed on a Staten Island air base. But that memorial is 2 miles away in a hard-to-reach corner of the vast cemetery, near a burial site of crash remains. Family members of some of those who perished on the ground told the New York Post in 1999 that they didn’t think a memorial was necessary at the 7th & Sterling crash site.
Memorial to crash victims in Greenwood Cemetery.
Of the many human stories from the Park Slope plane crash, the one I’ve come to identify with the most was the story of Dorothy (Campbell) Fletcher, a neighborhood woman who rushed to the scene, comforted young Stephen Baltz and got him to a hospital. New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital placed a small memorial to Stephen & the other victims in its Phillips Chapel, where Dorothy placed flowers every December as long as she was able.
New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital memorial plaque to the crash’s temporary survivor, including the change found in his pocket.
A neighborhood ghost bike
…As I walked around the block this May 2nd, I came to the site of another tragic accident, one block away at the corner of 6th & Sterling – but this location is marked by an obvious memorial. In April 2016 a young cyclist named James Gregg was killed in a collision with an oversized truck. A white bicycle memorial stands there.
Bike memorial to James Gregg, who died in an unrelated 2016 accident.
I was touched by this poignant mode of tribute for Mr. Gregg, and many other bikers around the world, which inspired me to write a song called Ghost Bikes, recently released on my album In Lieu of Flowers. Twice this spring, when I walked by the bike to notice flowers added for another anniversary, people in the neighborhood started conversations with me about it. The neighborhood remembers, and the bike gives them a catalyst to pay tribute.