This week, following a recommendation from my eldest daughter, I decided to visit the Titanic Exhibition at Old Orchard in Skokie. This exhibition, along with another one featuring the TV series Downton Abbey, is housed in the old Bloomingdale’s store in the shopping mall and they’ve certainly made good use of this vacated space.
Upon entry, we were given a boarding pass for the ship that sailed from Belfast on Wednesday, 10th of April 1912 at 9am. We were each assigned the name of one of the people who was aboard that fateful trip, mine being Margaret Rice, an Irish widow who was making the crossing with her five sons in 3rd class accommodations.
We began by watching a video giving a brief overview of the events leading up to the final moments of the voyage and then proceeded to the first room that dealt mainly with the building of the ship that was supposed to be unsinkable.
Although most, if not all, of the artifacts in the exhibit were taken from sister ships of the Titanic, they gave a good representation of what it was like on board this luxurious liner.
Along with numerous cases filled with items that would probably have been seen on board the Titanic, there were several re-creations of various parts of the ship including the boiler room that provided the power needed to make this much-touted record-breaking crossing.
Throughout the exhibit there were signs on the walls with descriptive passages from survivors detailing what it was like aboard the ship and there were appropriate sound effects and music from that era.
We walked down a corridor in the ship, visited a first-class suite and strolled on the deck on a starlit night. An idyllic setting for a memorable trip. Who could ever have imagined that it would end in such a disaster.
The section of the exhibition that dealt with the sinking of the Titanic brought home the sheer scale of the tragedy. Lifeboats launched holding just a few people when they should have carried at least 50. A crew, that had reportedly only had one previous emergency drill, who had to cope with evacuating more than 2,000 people. The panic and pandemonium must have been unimaginable. From the time that the Titanic struck the iceberg to the moment when it sank was a mere 2 hours.
As we approached the wall that listed the names of all those who perished and those who had survived, we looked, almost anxiously, for the name of our assigned passenger, some people calling out, “I made it!” while others groaned in sympathy for those who were lost. Margaret Rice did not survive, although her body was recovered. Her five sons, the eldest ten years old and the youngest only two years old were never found.
In one of the final rooms of the exhibition, we looked down below the plexiglass under our feet to a seabed littered with artifacts from the wreck while on a large screen a video, taken with an underwater camera, showed actual footage of the ship lying on the ocean floor.
There was a section devoted to the many film and television portrayals of the sinking of the Titanic including costumes, props and scripts. It’s phenomenal how even after all these years, this tragedy still captures people’s imaginations.