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Please be aware that the following show contains descriptions of disturbing events which took place in Brooklyn on December 5, 1876.

On the sidewalks of Cadman Plaza, New Yorkers rush by sights and memorials to Brooklyn history.

At its northernmost end, sets a tribute to William J. Gainer, the mayor of New York

from 1910 to 1913, who famously walked from his home and park slope over the Brooklyn Bridge

and to City Hall on his first day of work. A short distance south, children enjoy a game of soccer

next to the Brooklyn War Memorial,

dedicated to those from the borough who died during World War II.

Across Tilleri, you passed through the Korean War Veterans Plaza to get to one of Brooklyn's

most remarkable memorials of all, a monument to the minister and abolitionist, Henry Ward

Beecher, created by no less than master sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, and erected in 1891

over four years after Beatrice's death, and then moved to this area across from the Brooklyn

Federal Building and Post Office in the 1950s.

But if I had my way, we would move Henry off to another location,

because this exact corner, Johnson and Cadman Plaza East, formerly known as Washington Street, should be the site of another marker,

to a tragedy so catastrophic and nauseating that Brooklyn has mostly erased any signs that it ever

happened. For it was here on the late evening of December 5, 1876, that one of the greatest disasters in American history took place.

Of individual one-day disasters in New York City, only the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the General Slocombe disaster have taken more lives.

Those tragic events are well remembered in other places in the

city, but in a place that prides itself with never forgetting, the almost 300 people who lost their

...