1960 Plane Crash Site

Look up at 126 Sterling Place: the bricks on the upper floors are a different color from the identical brownstones on either side. That patch of mismatched masonry is the scar from the worst air disaster of its era.

On the morning of December 16, 1960, in light rain and fog, a United Airlines DC-8 bound for Idlewild Airport collided with a TWA Super Constellation descending toward LaGuardia. The Constellation came down on Staten Island. The DC-8 flew on for several miles with a crippled wing before plunging into Park Slope, a section of wing slicing through the top of 126 Sterling Place. Ten brownstones caught fire, along with the McCaddin Funeral Home, a Chinese laundry, a delicatessen, and a church called. The plane narrowly missed two gas stations and a Catholic school full of children. Six people on the ground were killed, among them a man selling Christmas trees on the sidewalk and a customer standing inside the deli.

One person was pulled alive from the wreckage. Stephen Baltz, an eleven-year-old from Illinois flying alone to meet his mother and sister for Christmas, had been thrown from the plane into a snowbank. Neighbors rolled him in the snow to put out his burning clothes. From his hospital bed, he described what he had seen out the window seconds before impact: "It looked like a picture out of a fairy book. It was a beautiful sight." He died the next day of pneumonia.

The crash killed 134 people across both sites. It was also the first American jet disaster investigated using a flight data recorder, the device that became known as the black box. The recorder showed the DC-8 had drifted miles past its clearance limit, probably because of a failed navigation radio. The findings pushed the FAA to cap aircraft speeds near airports and require pilots to report equipment failures.

A small memorial inside Phillips Chapel at New York Methodist Hospital holds 65 cents in nickels and dimes, the change found in Stephen Baltz's pocket when he was pulled from the snow. His father placed the coins in the hospital poor box, and they were later set into a plaque inscribed "Our Tribute to a Brave Little Boy."