This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Lizzie Peabody.

Palm trees bent nearly to the ground in the winds that tore through southern Florida.

Morning in September 1928, curtains of rain poured from the sky.

The storm surge ripped down dikes and overflowed dams flooding city after city in its path.

By the time the Category 5 Okeechobee hurricane passed, thousands of homes were torn down

to their foundations.

This hurricane kills almost 2,000 people.

It's one of the deadliest hurricanes up to that point in the United States.

Miss Karabkin is a professor of American art at the University of Maryland in College

Park.

She says 1,000 miles north of the hurricane, a woman named Augusta Savage was sitting

safely in her New York apartment when she got a message.

Her brother had been killed in the hurricane, her family's home destroyed, and with nowhere

to go, her entire extended family was headed north to stay with her.

The way she puts it is that the Red Cross bundled up the whole family and sent them on to

me here.

Augusta was in her mid-30s.

She had moved to New York City with the hopes of becoming a famous sculptor.

When her family arrived in her tiny Harlem apartment, she was on deadline, applying

for a coveted fellowship to study art in Paris.

Nine people living in such close quarters could have derailed her work.

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