4. Malbone Street Wreck, 1918

At the edge of Prospect Park on the Crown Heights/Prospect Lefferts Garden border, inside a tunnel beneath the intersection of Empire Boulevard, Flatbush Avenue and Ocean Avenue, the deadliest train crash in the history of the New York City subway system took place on November 1st, 1918. At least 93 people lost their lives, with an additional hundred or so injured, when a wooden five-car Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) train derailed. The curve towards the Prospect Park Subway Station was meant to be taken at six miles per hour, but the train was estimated to have been going at thirty to forty miles per hour (a Naval officer on the train thought it was over seventy). The first train car fell into a concrete partition between the north and southbound tracks, with the following cars cutting through and disintegrating it. There were no survivors at all in the first car.