Seventy-five years later and this image of a burned-out Morro Castle washed up just north of Convention Hall in Asbury Park is as compelling as the first time I saw it on an old postcard (which I framed & eventually stored in my mom's attic in Tennessee). The Asbury Park Press has a section devoted to the Morro Castle disaster, which claimed 137 lives and spawned just as many conspiracy theories about the ship's fate. Most of the Press' material is musty with one exception: a piece about how members of the First Separate Battalion, a segregated unit of the NJ Militia created in 1931, assisted in the rescue and collection of dead bodies that washed up during the early morning hours of Sept 8, 1934. Hundreds of thousands of people came to Asbury Park for weeks afterward to see the wreck, which was eventually towed to the old Brooklyn Shipyards.
This compilation of newsreel footage, complete with effete British narration, tells of "a terrible tragedy of the sea, equaled only by those of the Titanic and Lusitania." Watch for remarkable footage taken on the ship as it smoldered just off Asbury Park's 7th Avenue beach:
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