| The spell of fine, sometimes sweltering weather had been interrupted the day before, Sunday, when the average of the temperatures recorded in Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan, was 64Fthree points below normal for 7 June. At about ten in the morning, a heavy grey blanket of cloud had drooped low enough to make fog in many places, mist in most othersbut still, there was a long queue throughout the day for the express elevator towards the 102nd, 'observatory' floor of the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world, which had been open for little more than a month, and by mid-afternoon 25,000 people had groped their way across Brooklyn to the Floyd Bennett airfield and passed through entrances beside which were notices, 'LOW CEILING = NO FLYING. SORRY FOLKS.' |
| The fog was worst over the seaworst of all in the Lower Bay, which extends to the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, the opening to New York Harbour. One after another, five incoming liners glided at snail's pace along Ambrose Channel, the main shipping lane curving across the Lower Bay (though the channel's pinpointer, the Ambrose Lightship, was 7 1/2 nautical miles1 south of Long Beach, the wailing of the liners' sirens may have been just about audible to visitors there: some 20,000 of them, far fewer than was usual on a summer Sunday), and, slower still, into the harbour. Four of the five glided, even more slowly, to the piers of their respective lines, jutting into the Hudson River from the west side of Manhattan, arriving only a few hours late; but the master of the fifth vessel, the White Star Line's Adriatic, from Liverpool, hearing the harbour pilot's comment that the Statue of Liberty was somewhere close by on the port side, but himself seeing no sign of that imposing monument, straightway decided to stop engines and drop anchor till the morning. (It may be that, following the sinking of the White Star Line's allegedly unsinkable |
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