Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love
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113 years ago today on June 15, 1904, one of America's worst maritime disasters occurred in
New York City's East River. The fire aboard the passenger steamer General Slocum is generally not
as well remembered as other disasters of the era like the sinking of the Titanic, or the Shirtwaist
Factory fire, but it shouldn't be. The disaster on the General Slocum changed maritime policy,
transformed the neighborhoods of New York, and its victims deserve to be remembered.
The passenger steamer General Slocum was a side-wheel steamboat built in Brooklyn,
New York in 1891. She had a keel of 235 feet and was constructed of white oak and yellow
pine. She had one engine fed by two boilers and was propelled by two 31 foot diameter
paddle wheels on both sides. She was named after Civil War General Henry Warner Slocum,
who commanded the Union right at the Battle of Gettysburg and later represented New York State,
in the US House of Representatives. The General Slocum had three decks and was licensed for 2,500
passengers. It had had some mishaps in its day, several times it had grounded on sand banks, twice
it had collided with other vessels and in 1901, some drunken passengers had tried to take control
of the steamship. The crew fought them off, seventeen were arrested. The ship was operated
by the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company and was generally used for day excursions. It was built
as the largest and most splendid excursion steamer in New York. It had recently been overhauled and
in May of 1904, had been inspected by the fire marshal who proclaimed its firefighting equipment
in fine working order. In 1904 the General Slocum was captained by 68 year-old William Van Schaick,
who had been cited for ferrying millions of passengers, with an unblemished safety record.
Large numbers of immigrants from Germany flowed into New York City in the 1840s and 1850s. By
1855, New York City was third in the world, behind Berlin and Vienna, for the largest
German population in a city. Many of those immigrants congregated in a neighborhood in
the Lower East Side of Manhattan that was called Little Germany; the German population in the
neighborhood quadrupled between 1845 and 1855. By 1870 Little Germany encompassed 400 square blocks.
St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church was a centerpiece of the Little Germany community;
its parishioners included some of the most established families in the neighborhood. On
June 15th of 1904 St. Mark's had chartered the General Slocum for $350, for a day excursion to
the picnic grounds on Locust Point Long Island. It was an annual end of school celebration, the
17th held in a row, and an exciting opportunity to escape the city for a day. As it was a weekday,
the passengers were mostly women and children, heavily weighted down with picnic baskets and
looking forward to the exciting day. It was a beautiful day out, there was a German band
playing on the deck, and St. Mark's beloved Reverend, the Reverend George Haas was on deck
with his wife and daughter when she cast off. The General Slocum was carrying about 1400 passengers.
The fire started in the lamp room towards the front of the ship, possibly started by
a discarded cigarette, but it quickly spread in a room full of oily rags. The ship was passing
97th Street when the crew first noticed smoke coming up through the floorboards. Turns out
that the crew had never done a fire drill, and when they went to use the fire equipment they
found out that it had not been maintained, the hoses burst. The fire was too big for them to
fight. One of the crew complained that it was like trying to put out Hell itself! The captain
said that the blaze was the wildest he had ever seen. The fire ripped through the wooden decks,
apparently further fueled by flammable paint. The passengers had been given no instruction
on how to abandon ship, and it turns out that the lifeboats were similarly not maintained.
They had been wired and painted to the deck, they burned before they could be lowered. The
life preservers had been hanging outside, subject to the elements for thirteen years,
when passengers grabbed them they disintegrated, having broken down to nothing but cork powder,
they sank like rocks. Like most Americans of the time, very few of the passengers could swim,
and they were weighted down by their woolen clothes. The decks collapsed in the fire,
throwing people into the fire, crushing them! Reverend Haas, as the fire reached them, jumped
overboard with his wife and daughter! They hung on for a while but all the people jumping off knocked
them apart and they were separated. His burns were so bad that he had to sit behind a screen
at his wife's funeral, a week later his daughter was among the last of the bodies to be identified.
One newspaper described it as a spectacle of horror beyond words to express. A great vessel,
all in flames sweeping forward in the sunlight, within sight of the crowded city,
while her helpless screaming hundreds were roasted alive, or swallowed up in waves.
Captain Van Schaick tried to steer towards a wharf but he was waved off by a tugboat,
the fear was that the flames would spread to lumber and oil drums that were stored on
the dock. And so instead he steered towards North Brother Island, about two miles away,
was an island that held a hospital for infectious diseases. The captain's hope was to be able to
ground the Slocum on her side so that the passengers could get off, and so he kept
her going at full steam, holding on to the wheel even as his own clothes caught fire. The wheels
were spinning so fast that some passengers they jumped off, they were crushed by them,
and the speed of the boat only fanned the flames and made it worse. When she grounded she didn't
ground on her side, she grounded on her bow, which meant that the rear of the boat where most of the
passengers had gone to escape the flames, was still over 25 feet of water with a deadly tide.
In the end only 321 of the people of what the General Slocum survived. Bodies washed
up on shore for days after, but only around 600 were recovered. More than
400 were never found. It was the deadliest disaster in the history of New York City,
up until 9/11 in 2001. In 1906, a memorial fountain was installed in Tompkins Square
Park. It's inscription read, “They are Earth's purest children, young and fair.”
Captain Van Schaick and the principal officers of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company were all
indicted for failure to maintain the safety equipment. But the captain was the only one
that was ever taken to trial. He was acquitted of manslaughter but he was convicted of criminal
negligence and given a sentence of 10 years. He was pardoned due to his age by President Taft in
1912. The disaster aboard the General Slocum led to significant changes in maritime regulations
regarding the maintenance of emergency equipment, it transformed the industry. The neighborhood of
Little Germany was already somewhat in decline in 1904, really a result of its own success, many of
the residents had become successful enough to move up town, but after the General Slocum disaster the
neighborhood faded quickly. There were funerals held for weeks, and after that was followed by
depression and several suicides. There wasn't a family in the neighborhood that wasn't touched
by the disaster and, it seems that with the fire aboard the Slocum the heart of the neighborhood
simply went away. Little Germany faded in 1940, the Evangelical Lutheran Church was converted
into a synagogue, representing the change in demographics in the neighborhood. And while Little
Germany is gone, the victims of the fire aboard the General Slocum, still deserve to be remembered
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