11 Places to visit the Titanic that aren't on the ocean floor

With over 200 original objects from Titanic or her sister ship Olympic, this exhibit is a riveting (no pun intended: some say the ship failed because of badly-hammered rivets) look at the passengers, crew and infrastructure of the ship. There’s a lot to see with the included audio tour in multiple languages: three hours can quickly pass. The exhibit has a small-scale cutaway model of the ship so you can see into the staterooms and boiler rooms, a metal iceberg that you can touch to get a visceral idea of how cold the water was that night, and full-size replicas of a first-class hallway, a first-class suite, a third class bunkroom and the telegraph office. Although you may enter in high spirits (the experience starts with a photo opp as you walk up the “gangplank”), you’ll quickly become sober as you learn how younger children made it onto lifeboats with their mothers while older ones perished with their fathers. There are too many objects to describe, but a few standouts are a tiny pair of shoes worn by a little girl survivor (with a photo of her wearing them after rescue), the thin, sleeveless nightgown worn by a woman who had been sleeping when a crewmember knocked to tell her to go up to the boat deck, an actual deck chair from the ship and perhaps most touching: a life jacket recovered from an unknown victim.

Margaret Brown was never known as Molly; the makers of the 1960 musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown deemed “Margaret” too hard to sing, so they gave her a posthumous nickname that has stuck. She’s best known for encouraging other women in her lifeboat to row back to pick up people in the water, but her life was filled with activism well before she sailed on the Titanic. She advocated for a minimum wage and an eight-hour workday, as well as fighting to get the vote for women. There’s much more to say, but her Titanic experience involved being dropped four feet through the air into an already-lowering lifeboat, distributing blankets to other survivors on the rescue ship Carpathia, and pressing her first-class colleagues to donate funds for third-class passengers who had lost everything (she raised $10k, roughly $312k in today’s money, while still on the Carpathia). The house museum has been restored to look as it did when she lived there with her husband. Look for the tiny Egyptian ushabti statue which is sometimes on display, a replica of the one Brown purchased in Egypt, took with her when she departed the sinking ship, and later gave to the Carpathia’s Captain Rostron.

The owners of Macy’s, Isidor and Ida Straus, went down with the Titanic. Mrs. Straus was urged to climb into a lifeboat but she refused to go without her husband, and so they retreated together to Boat Deck A to sit on steamer chairs and await their fate. In the James Cameron movie, they are the couple that returned to their stateroom to lie in bed together. At the flagship Macy’s store at 151 W. 34th Street, you can see a plaque created by their heartsick employees with dimensional representations of the couple and the wording, “Their lives were beautiful and their deaths glorious. This tablet is the voluntary token of sorrowing employees.” Isidor had been good to his employees, offering health insurance and a cafeteria that served hot meals to them. According to the website The Classic Eight, in 2000 Macy’s remodeled and covered up the memorial entrance with the plaque. Thankfully, in 2011 the entry was restored—you can step inside and see the memorial (and ride the 1902 wooden escalators still in play). The plaque includes the couple’s birth dates; interestingly, this intensely-connected husband and wife shared the same birthday, four years apart: February 6.

A ship called the Mackay-Bennett combed the area where the Titanic sank, picking up bodies still floating in their life jackets (most did not drown but instead died of hypothermia). Even after death, class differences separated how passengers were treated: first-class passengers were embalmed and placed into coffins for transit, second-class passengers were put into canvas winding sheets, and 116 third-class passengers were weighted and returned to the sea. The ship then came to Halifax with 190 bodies. Today, 150 of those souls are buried across three cemeteries, with Fairview Lawn holding 121 graves, Mount Olivet holding 19 and Baron de Hirsch (now called the Beth Israel Synagogue Cemetery) holding 10. At Fairview Lawn, one grave is particularly sad, that of a little boy of about 2 years old. The Mackay-Bennett crew had split the $100,000 reward for finding John Jacob Astor IV’s body and used some of that money to erect a memorial for the boy with the wording, “Erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the disaster to the Titanic.” In 2007, DNA testing identified the child as Sidney Leslie Goodwin.

After paying homage to the two lions that flank the entrance, you can enter Astor Hall, named for the family whose descendant John Jacob Astor IV died when the Titanic sank. It’s a beautiful entry with soaring ceilings, curving staircases and free-standing candelabra. It’s John Jacob Astor I whose Astor Library (today, the Joseph Papp Public Theater) collections paired with those of James Lenox to form the New York Public Library. Upstairs on the third floor, the Edna Barnes Solomon Room contains a multitude of portraits on the walls, including an 1896 painting of John Jacob Astor IV. In the painting, he is dressed formally but sits with his legs crossed on a blue brocade chair. The crew of the Mackay-Bennett identified him by his cufflinks—and his pregnant wife Madeleine delivered their child in August, just four months later.

This eye-catching museum is in a building that literally looks like the Titanic and bills itself as the world’s largest Titanic museum attraction. Inside are 400 artifacts, replicas of rooms, and the visceral experience of standing on a sloping deck. When you enter, you receive a “boarding pass” from a real passenger, and by the time you exit you learn whether your person survived. A grand staircase is made from the original Harland & Wolff plans, and you can walk down this $1 million exact copy. Other experiences that help you understand how horrific the disaster was: touching an iceberg and putting your hand in 28-degree water, sitting in a lifeboat, shoveling coal in the boiler room and sending an SOS distress signal in the telegraph room. You can also check out the sister museum in Branson, MO, which reviewers on Encyclopedia-Titanica say is nearly the same (maybe they should call one the Olympic Museum, then) except that Branson has mini golf and Pigeon Forge has a zombie experience. Neither seems particularly respectful to the dead of Titanic! Pigeon Forge also seems to better represent the third class experience on board ship, reviewers say.

Upon landing in New York, surviving crew members went to the safety of the American Seaman’s Friend Society Sailor’s Home & Institute, a place built to house sailors on leave, with rooms that resemble ship’s cabins with berths (still the case today!) It’s quite close to the dock where the Carpathia had come in, and the crew held a memorial service here four days after the sinking. The sailors stayed here until the official inquiry was over (many of them were back at sea immediately after). When you enter the space today, now known as the Jane Hotel, it’s clear that renovations are underfoot, and word is that it will convert to a private club with monthly membership fees. Staff dress in vintage uniforms with bellhop hats. In the beautifully tiled lobby, there's a small water fountain against the wall which a staff member said is a memorial to the Titanic but the plaque on the floor in front of it has long ago lost its lettering.

It’s nearly impossible to make out the wording on this ancient arch, but it says “Cunard White Star Line,” and it marks the dock where the Carpathia came into port: where the shattered survivors set foot on earth for the first time since their ship sank beneath them. There is an infographic painted on the plexiglass fence with an illustration of the Titanic (as well as information on other ships like the Lusitania, which departed from this dock). You can find this at the remnants of Pier 54, just a stone’s throw from the Whitney Museum. The Titanic was originally intended to dock at Pier 59, today a multimedia fashion studio called Pier59 Studios. Take a moment to reflect on the emotions of the survivors reaching safe harbor and then walk under the arch to experience the whimsy of Little Island. This is an artificial island park that opened in 2021, consisting of greenery and trees on concrete “tulips” on stems. The wooden piles that once held up Pier 54 are still in place as a habitat for fish.

This museum covers the history of the maritime industry in Nova Scotia, from small craft boatbuilding to the WWII convoys and, of course, Halifax's role in the recovery efforts after the Titanic sank. As the website says, "While Titanic’s survivors went to New York, all who perished came to Halifax." There are over 50 objects in the museum's permanent collection focused on the shipwreck, including a replica of a deck chair which you can first rearrange and then sit in. Flotsam from the wreck drifted into the harbor and many local families preserved the beautifully carved woodwork now on display. The shoes of the Unknown Child (see entry #4) are here, the two-year-old boy whose death so affected the crew of the Mackay-Bennett. No relatives claimed the shoes, so they were kept in a policeman's desk drawer for years—Halifax police were posted to safeguard victims' bodies and belongings against souvenir hunters. You can also see one of the mortuary bags used to hold personal effects from the bodies buried at sea so they could be returned to victims' families. Other objects in the collections include a wall-sized photo enlargement of the grand staircase, gloves from a millionaire who perished in the sinking, a first-class bathroom cupboard made of mahogany, and more.

In this small city park at Broadway and 106th Street, a statue commemorates Isidor and Ida Straus, who died together on the Titanic after Ida refused to get into a lifeboat without Isidor. A Biblical quotation on the monument honors Ida's decision: "Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." New Yorkers donated $20,000 to create the statue, which shows a bronze figure of Memory personified (famed statue model Audrey Munson posed) near a reflecting pool. The monument was dedicated on the Titanic's sinking anniversary, three years later. Today the reflecting pool is instead a flowerbed. The Strauses had lived near this park, in a frame house at 27-47 Broadway, near 105th Street, with lavish lawns and large trees (now demolished).

A new movie called Unsinkable, now in post-production and starring beloved Karen Allen from Raiders of the Lost Ark, was filmed here in Pittsburgh. It focuses on the U.S. Senate investigation after the Titanic disaster. Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts, where the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra plays, was recast as the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York (which was demolished for the building of the Empire State Building) where the official inquiry took place. Other sites in Pittsburgh were used as well, such as Ligonier Beach—really an enormous pool—which was cast as the Atlantic, with lifeboats floating in its 1.3 million gallons of water.