Plane Crash Forever Changed Park Slope 61 Years Ago

PARK SLOPE BROOKLYN — Brooklyn Methodist's pediatric intensive care unit was funded in part by the blackened coins found in a boy's pocket after a plane crashed in the streets of Park Slope exactly 61 years ago Thursday, according to borough historians.

The Park Slope Plane Crash forever changed the neighborhood on Dec. 16, 1960 when United Airlines 826 lost radio navigation and crashed into a La Guardia-bound TWA plane mid-air, historians say.

The collision sent the TWA craft careening toward Staten Island and the United Airlines plane crashed on Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place.

The 128 passengers on both planes were killed, as well as five pedestrians standing near the intersection and a man inside a nearby church, according to a history of New York Methodist Hospital.

A total 135 people lost their lives in the crashes.

The ravaged United Airlines craft left an enormous trench on Sterling Place and set fire to ten homes, the Pillar of Fire Church and the McCaddin Funeral Home, according to historians from the Brooklyn Public Library.

Eleven-year-old Stephen L. Baltz, who had been traveling by himself to spend Christmas with family in Yonkers, was found on a Park Slope snow bank, according to Methodist Hospital historical report.

Emergency responders rushed the boy to Brooklyn Methodist, where he lapsed in and out of consciousness and told doctors he worried about his mother waiting at the airport to greet him, hospital historians said.

The Hospital’s chief emergency service nurse Shiela Carolan described Baltz as “bright and sunny,” the report notes.

Brooklyn Methodist received hundreds of telegram and phone calls of support for the Baltz, who died from his burns the next day.

Baltz's father gave the hospital blackened coins from the boy's pocket to begin the fund that would later establish the Pediatric Department's intensive care unit, according to the hospital.

Those coins are also embossed on a memorial plaque stamped in the Methodist Hospital chapel reads, "Our tribute to a brave little boy."