King of the Waterfront
When an event is really sad -- and when it isn't fixed to any particular spot on the U.S. mainland (think Challenger) -- its memorial is often built in the District, aka the nation's official boneyard. That certainly seems to be the case with the Titanic Memorial along the Washington Channel in Southwest, a forgotten monument to a forgotten age, dedicated to a catastrophe itself anything but forgotten.
Unlike other local markers of tragedy, it is pointedly not a memorial to all who perished. Rather, the project was undertaken by American women to salute the "women and children first" ethos that sent captains of industry to Davy Jones' locker. Prompted by former first lady Helen Taft -- who was in the White House when the ship sank -- women from around the country sent in $1 each for its construction. Newspapers of the day referred to her as "Mrs. William Howard Taft," showing that even while doing the menfolk a favor, credit still went to their husbands.
The statue first went up in 1931 at the foot of New Hampshire Avenue, alongside Potomac Parkway, then called Riverside. It stayed in Foggy Bottom for more than 30 years before being removed in time for LBJ to break ground on the Kennedy Center. Today it's an afterthought, beached on this remote waterway, wedged between concrete box apartments and the disinviting brick wall surrounding Fort McNair.
Among the 500 or so in attendance at the dedication on May 26, 1931 were President and Mrs. Hoover, Secretary of State Henry Stimson, federal parks director U.S. Grant III (we would hope he was the Hank Williams III of his day), and Mrs. Taft, who did the unveiling.
The pedestal reads:
WHO PERISHED
IN THE WRECK
OF THE TITANIC
APRIL 15 1912
THEY GAVE THEIR
LIVES THAT WOMEN
AND CHILDREN
MIGHT BE SAVED
ERECTED BY THE
WOMEN OF AMERICA
One could argue it's not a memorial to the RMS Titanic at all, but actually to paternalism.
The sculptor was a scion of the gilded Vanderbilts, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, aka Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, aka Anderson Cooper's great-aunt. (Speaking of paternalism, the statue does includes the inscription: "GERTRUDE VANDERBILT WHITNEY 1931," although we wonder if it was added later.) In addition to founding the Whitney Museum in New York, Gert did the fountain in the Aztec Garden at the Organization of American States building on 17th Street and Constitution Avenue NW.
The figure is supposedly based on her brother Alfred, but DCist doesn't see the resemblance. Interestingly, Al was at the center of a Washington sex scandal in his day -- rumor was he'd been making it with the wife of the Cuban attaché -- before going down on Titanic's sister ship, the Luisitania.
Anyway, you must have noticed by now that the statue looks almost exactly like the "king of the world" posture first embarrassingly assumed by Winslet and Leo DiCaprio in you-know-what-movie and later, even more embarrassingly, by an Academy-thanking James Cameron. (Not to mention untold others.) Whether Cameron took his inspiration from this statue is a matter of speculation, but it's tough to chalk it up as mere coincidence.
Though the monument itself has all but disappeared from the city's consciousness, there exists a semi-secret society in town that pays tribute to it once a year: the Titanic Men's Society, described by the Post in a July obituary as having "met for more than 20 years to salute the chivalric spirit of the 1,360 men who lost their lives aboard the Titanic. The group, dressed in black tie, gathers at a Titanic memorial at the edge of the Potomac to raise a champagne toast at 1 a.m. every April 15, the hour and date the ship sank in 1912." If anybody knows anything more about this group or how to contact them, drop us a line.
To visit the Titanic memorial, take the Green line to Waterfront-SEU station, walk to the end of 4th Street SW (at P Street), hang a right, and walk to the waterfront promenade.
(Titanic still from Paramount.)