Titanic: The Exhibit opens in Dallas
Few tragedies have caught the public’s imagination as much as the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic in April, 1912. Its wreckage was located in 1985. James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic film was the first movie to break the billion-dollar mark. More recently, the OceanGate submersible disaster made news in 2023. In September, salvage crews rediscovered a famous statue from the first-class lounge almost 2.5 miles underwater.
Dallas’ Titanic: The Exhibition covers all this. The White Star Line had determined to challenge the Cunard Line’s dominance on the transatlantic passenger trade with luxury rather than speed. They depict the high spirits of the Titanic’s passengers. But they also drop clues as to how many small incidents, inexperience, and hubris combined together to lead to that fatal night. We see the chaos of the two hours and forty minutes from the initial impact to the final sinking, followed by official inquiries and safety reforms. Not stopping there, you see images of the Titanic’s debris scattered along the seabed, followed by costumes and props from James Cameron’s movie. Finally, your visit concludes with the opportunity to explore parts of the Titanic via a virtual reality headset.
Because the Titanic itself was inaccessible for so many years, and even now, it’s at the limits of technology to retrieve any salvage (all but coal is illegal to take from the debris field), there are relatively few genuine Titanic pieces in the exhibit... but they are there. (A cup and saucer stolen by a passenger who disembarked in Belfast; a genuine piece of wood from the Titanic’s Grand Staircase.) Many of the items on display are from its elder identical twin, the Olympic, scrapped in 1935, because the White Star Line used many of the same objects (such as dinnerware) on the three sister ships. There are plentiful pieces of ephemera: advertisements, photos, postcards sent by passengers on earlier legs of its fateful maiden voyage. The items are all from the Rene Bergeron White Star Line collection, the largest collection of Titanic artifacts in Canada.
One highlight is the care they took in recreating various locations on the Titanic. There are plenty of places to grab a selfie: in a replica of a first-class hallway, in front of a replica of the Strauss suite (the most luxurious suite on a luxurious ship); on the steps of the Grand Staircase; on the starlit first-class promenade. But there’s also the eerie glass floor over the seabed, with a video playing nearby of the Titanic’s real-life debris field...
Timed entry tickets are available online. Upon arrival, you’ll receive a boarding pass for a real- life Titanic passenger. You’ll discover their fate at the end of your visit. (Mine was a Missouri debutante who survived.) Give yourself an hour if you’re casually interested, but you can easily spend two hours here. The exhibit is here through early May. It is located at Pepper Square in Dallas, 2.5 hours from Olney, next to Urban Air.
A scale model of the White Star Line’s Titanic (above) and the Grand Staircase (L) are among the exhibits at “Titanic: The Exhibition,” now at Pepper Square in Dallas.
Photo by Deanna Baran