I finally found some free time to wander over to Union Terminal to check out the Titanic: Artifact Exhibition that’s been there for a while. Too many times I’ve set out to take in exhibits like this only to find that they’d left the day before… so I was pretty happy to find out it wasn’t going to be leaving until the week after this.

Like many people, I’ve always found the Titanic story very interesting. While there’s the tales of pride and tragedy that accompany the ship and it’s maiden voyage, there’s something equally mysterious about it disappearing into the sea. The ocean holds many mysteries, and sunken ships have always fascinated me. When I took up scuba diving years ago, I loved the idea of diving sunken ships and exploring them. I think part of my fascination is that old childhood dream of finding pirate treasure or something like that. But what I truly found interesting was the juxtaposition of being able to swim through something that should be floating atop the water. I don’t imagine I’m the only person to be charmed by that thought, since dive parks have been sinking boats, planes, cars and anything else they can for divers to explore. Seeing the artifacts from the wreckage touches that bit of treasure-finding dreamer within me. It was incredible to see the things that they were able to recover and restore. I’m particularly surprised by the different paper items they were able to recover, like letters and paper money. It stuns me that these were able to survive in the depths, let alone be restored so well. When I left for the exhibit, I was hoping I’d come back with some great photos from it. Unfortunately for me, there was no photography allowed, so people must live with my photos of the building.

I was also very pleased with how they contextualized the story of the passengers. There were recreations of different areas (for example, passenger rooms) and little biographies of passengers that you’d normally expect. What I thought was an interesting touch, was the presentation of a “boarding pass” to each visitor which held some details about one of the passengers who might have been traveling in any class on the Titanic, as well as who their traveling companions were. One of the final pieces of the exhibit is a wall listing who survived and who was lost, so each visitor could track down their passenger and learn their fate.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 10:59 pm in History. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.