One of the grimmest ship sinkings of all time took place--not in a storm at sea--but on a sunny day in the heart of a great city.

At 7:15 Saturday morning, July 24, 1915, William Raphael looked out of the window in the commission house he managed on South Water Street, Chicago. Below, along the Clark Street Dock, Western Electric employees were boarding five lake steamers chartered to take them to the dune country for their annual picnic.

Small convoys of children tugged excitedly at their parents' arms, leading them towards the ship of their choice. In most cases this was the Eastland, a trim three-decker with two tall stacks amidships, which had seen 12 years of excursion service on the Great Lakes.

At 7:20, Raphael turned from the window and began sorting consignment papers on his desk. He could not have been at work for more than six minutes when he heard what he later described with pitiful simplicity as "a ship flopping over with a crash and a splash." He ran out toward the dock and saw that the Eastland had turned completely over on her port side. The starboard hull lay 15 feet out of water at its highest point and the Chicago River was jammed "like a tub of apples" with struggling humanity and flotsam.

A few minutes earlier, on the old Clark Street Bridge over the river, Harlan E. Babcock, a reporter for the Herald, had been hurrying toward the Eastland. He had been assigned to cover the excursion, but had overslept. He looked down on the ship from this bird's eye angle and noted its upper deck "black with people, mostly women and children." The vessel was obviously overcrowded.

And as Babcock watched, the long, slender Eastland rolled outward and away from the pier as though it were a toy boat pushed gently but persistently over on its side by a small boy's hand. The mass of passengers on the upper deck moved to one side like a shovelful of coal sliding slowly down a chute and was spewed into the river, amidst deck chairs and luggage. He saw apparently good swimmers strike out for shore not 30 feet away, then go down as panicky non-swimmers clutched them in frenzy.

At first there was a great stillness, then the river channel was filled with the cacophony of disaster, cries for help, and the macabre and muffled sounds of the unfortunate victims trapped within the ship's hull. It seemed impossible that the disaster could have occurred without warning.

But there had been warning. The most important came at a little after 7:00 that sunny morning. On the Eastland's high, white flying bridge, Captain Harry Pedersen was supervising the transfer of a line to the small tug, Kenosha. On the hurricane deck, a band played hit tunes of the day as the picnic-bound passengers streamed aboard.

Captain Pedersen was concerned about a list to starboard and leaned over the rail to order the gangplank in and no more passengers permitted aboard. He also ordered the engineer to trim ship by partially filling the port ballast tanks.

"Don't over trim her!" he shouted in the speaking tube. The ship had listed badly several times in the past, and although Pedersen "didn't think there was any danger," nevertheless, after 25 years on the Lakes, he knew crowded decks could mean trouble.

In the engine room the orders were relayed to a young assistant engineer and two oilers working the ballast intake valves.

"Knock off the water. The Old Man says you're overdoing it."

"All right, all right. Close valves."

For some unexplained reason--sloppy handling or pure error--the orders were not complied with properly. The gauge showed more and more water pouring in, with a corresponding list.

"Look to that damned valve!"

But by that time it was too late. The port side of the compartment was abruptly transformed into the deck. Loose equipment rocketed across the steel plates and men tumbled helplessly against the hot pipes where they were first scorched by the hot metal, then suffocated by billowing steam and finally drowned by the torrents of water sucked in from the muddy river above. Some of the crew below decks had no chance of escape at all.

More fortunate in some cases were passengers in the staterooms above. Mrs. William Peterson, wife of a Western Electric foreman, was in a starboard stateroom. At 7:15 she felt the hull lurch "somewhat like a trolley rounding a corner."

Her first impression was that the ship was underway, but when she looked out the porthole the dock seemed to be in the same position.

The second time the hull lurched, she decided she must be having a dizzy spell. The room gave her the same sensation as standing in a tilted fun house at an amusement park. She was suddenly thrown to the floor, and then saw with disbelief that she was not on the floor at all but prone on the stateroom door. Her hands and shoulders were immersed in something cool. It was water.

Then, with a popping sound, the door was shoved upward and before she knew what had happened she was struggling underwater. Choking with horror, Mrs. Peterson fought to the surface. Directly overhead, where the ceiling should have been, was a porthole, through which she could see the bright sky.

From outside came faraway sounds like the wind through many trees. Mrs. Peterson screamed as loudly as she could. After the third or fourth scream, a face appeared at the porthole, white with terror. "I saw two hands reaching in. They pulled me through the porthole."

In another stateroom, but on the port side, Lottie Anderson, her sister and eight other girls in their teens and early 20's had been admiring each other's dresses, since a prize was to be given for the most beautiful summer costume. Lottie was standing near the cabin window (on this deck many cabins did not have portholes) when suddenly one of the girls shoved her in what seemed like more than an accidental jostle.

As Lottie opened her mouth to demur, she was horrified to see the entire group coming at her head on. With a splintering of glass, she was pitched headlong out the window and into what she angrily thought to be a tremendous tub of water. She floundered around under the surface and was then propelled by some great force outward and upward, to find herself struggling in the middle of the Chicago River. She never saw sister or friends alive again.

To one couple, standing at the starboard rail of the main deck, the entire side seemed to rise up gently, as on a large wave, without warning. Someone shouted, "Get back!" They had to cling to the rail to keep from falling. As the ship rolled over, they crawled slowly, almost calmly, onto the starboard side of the hull. All motion quickly ceased and they found themselves standing on what they thought looked like half of a giant turtle shell.

Several others were standing there, numbly, not even wet. More were slithering around where the metal curved into the muddy water. One of the persons near them was L. D. Gadory, a candy hawker who had been working the lower deck. He sensed what was happening when he felt the list, looked towards the pier, and saw a heavy hawser snap as the capsizing ship tugged against it.

"My God, I wonder what happened to all those kids. All those kids." He had been in the midst of a small platoon of them and shouted a warning to "get over this way."

Little Helen Thayer, age eight, and her brother, Harry, seven, were standing on the deck with their parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Thayer, when suddenly every one not able to grasp the starboard rail had started slipping and tumbling across the deck. Mrs. Thayer grabbed a stanchion, told the children to hang onto her, and momentarily checked their fall. The deck was now at about a 40-degree angle, so by the time she lost her grip all three of them plunged with terrific force towards the jumble of horror-stricken people.

Somehow Mrs. Thayer managed to catch hold of the children after they were dumped into the river. She remembered treading water endlessly, holding the two small heads just above the water. The confusion around her became blurred and her left arm, with which she held Helen, grew numb and the child slipped from her grasp and disappeared. Little Harry was still clinging to her shoulder when a policeman grabbed her and began swimming with her. "My husband and child," she kept moaning over and over. But they had disappeared.

By this time, William Raphael, the manager of the commission house, had jumped in to aid two women struggling only ten feet from shore. He reached them quickly and "a fat man, his face green with terror," floundered close enough to grab one of the women's dresses and hang on. When he started to drag them under, Raphael had only one choice. "I kicked him in the face to make him let go. I couldn't swim with the whole load." But the fat man held his grip on the woman and sank beneath the water, pulling her to death with him. Raphael got the other woman to safety.

The Chicago River-- in the shadow of giant skyscrapers--was crammed with dead and dying grotesquely intermixed with debris from the ship and a fantastic collection of furniture, crates, timbers and anything else that would float, which had been frantically tossed to them as makeshift life preservers.

Two tugs and a fireboat were wallowing among the debris, hauling survivors and corpses aboard like so much baggage. A policeman was rowing a tiny boat all but submerged by people in the water hanging to the gunwales as he dragged them towards shore.

Underneath the pier, a man clung to a spike on a piling while two women and three small children used him as a human ladder to climb to safety. Afterwards the man slipped under the water in exhaustion and disappeared.

Rescuers now arrived with acetylene torches and began cutting into the hull to rescue those trapped inside. The number taken out alive was pitifully small.

The final toll of the disaster was 812 dead, countless numbers injured, 22 entire families wiped out of existence.

Acting Mayor Moorehouse of Chicago proclaimed a state of emergency, ordered all places of amusement in the city closed for one day and prohibited the public showing of any films taken at the scene of the tragedy. Captain Pedersen and 29 surviving members of his crew were placed under arrest pending investigation.

The public, numbed by the immensity of the disaster, first blamed the captain, then the engineer, then the steamship company for permitting overcrowding. It took more than 20 years for the courts to reach the final decision, announced in newspapers on August 7, 1935: that the steamship company "is not liable for 812 deaths in the disaster... that the boat was seaworthy; that the operators had taken proper precautions; that the responsibility was traced to an engineer who neglected to fill the ballast tanks properly."