The PS General Slocum was a passenger steamboat built in Brooklyn, New York,
in 1891. The General Slocum was named for Civil War General and New York
Congressman Henry Warner Slocum. She operated in the New York City area as an
excursion steamer for the next thirteen years under the same ownership. During
her service history, she was involved in a number of mishaps, including multiple
groundings and collisions. On June 15, 1904, the General Slocum
caught fire and sank in the East River of New York City. At the time of the
accident she was on a chartered run carrying members of St. Mark's
Evangelical Lutheran Church to a church picnic. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342
people on board died. The General Slocum disaster was the New York area's worst
disaster in terms of loss of life until the September 11, 2001 attacks. It is
the worst maritime disaster in the city's history. The events surrounding
the General Slocum fire were explored in a number of books, plays and movies.
Construction and design The General Slocum was built by Devine
Burtis, Jr., a Brooklyn boatbuilder who was awarded the contract on February 15,
1891. Her keel was 235 feet long and the hull was 37.5 feet wide constructed of
white oak and yellow pine. The Slocum measured 1,284 tons gross, and had a
hull depth of 12.3 feet. The Slocum was constructed with three decks, three
watertight compartments and 250 electric lights.
General Slocum was powered by a single-cylinder, surface condensing
vertical beam steam engine with 53 inch bore and 12 foot stroke, built by W. &
A. Fletcher Company of Hoboken, New Jersey. Steam was supplied by two
boilers at a working pressure of 52 psi. The Slocum was a sidewheel boat. Each
wheel had 26 paddles and was 31 feet in diameter. Her maximum speed was about 16
knots. The ship was usually manned by a crew of 22, including Captain William H.
Van Schaick and two pilots. Service history
The General Slocum experienced a series of mishaps following her launch in 1891.
Four months after her launching, she ran aground off Rockaway. Tugboats had to be
used to pull her free. A number of incidents occurred during
1894. On July 29, while returning from Rockaway with approximately 4,700
passengers, the Slocum struck a sandbar with enough force that her electrical
generator went out. The next month, the Slocum ran aground off Coney Island
during a storm. During this grounding, the passengers had to be transferred to
another ship. In September 1894 the Slocum collided with the tug R. T. Sayre
in the East River, with the General Slocum sustaining substantial damage to
her steering. In July 1898, another collision occurred
when the Slocum collided with the Amelia near Battery Park. On August 17, 1901,
while carrying what was described as 900 intoxicated Paterson anarchists, some of
the passengers started a riot on board and tried to take control of the vessel.
The crew fought back and kept control of the ship. The captain docked the ship at
the police pier, and 17 men were taken into custody by the police. In June 1902
the General Slocum ran aground with 400 passengers aboard. With the vessel
unable to be freed, the passengers had to camp out overnight while the ship
remained stuck. 1904 disaster
The General Slocum worked as a passenger ship, taking people on excursions around
New York City. On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, the ship had been chartered for
$350 by St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Little Germany district of
Manhattan. This was an annual rite for the group, which had made the trip for
17 consecutive years, a period when German settlers moved out of Little
Germany for the Upper East and West Sides. Over 1,400 passengers, mostly
women and children, boarded the Slocum, which was to sail up the East River and
then eastward across the Long Island Sound to Locust Grove, a picnic site in
Eatons Neck, Long Island. The ship got underway at 9:30 a.m. As it
was passing East 90th Street, a fire started in the Lamp Room in the forward
section, possibly caused by a discarded cigarette or match. It was fueled by the
straw, oily rags, and lamp oil strewn around the room. The first notice of a
fire was at 10:00 a.m.; eyewitnesses claimed the initial blaze began in
various locations, including a paint locker filled with flammable liquids and
a cabin filled with gasoline. Captain Van Schaick was not notified until ten
minutes after the fire was discovered. A 12-year-old boy had tried to warn him
earlier but was not believed. Although the captain was ultimately
responsible for the safety of passengers, the owners had made no
effort to maintain or replace the ship's safety equipment. The fire hoses had
been allowed to rot, and fell apart when the crew tried to put out the fire. The
crew had never practiced a fire drill, and the lifeboats were tied up and
inaccessible. Survivors reported that the life preservers were useless and
fell apart in their hands. Desperate mothers placed life jackets on their
children and tossed them into the water, only to watch in horror as their
children sank instead of floating. Most of those on board were women and
children who, like most Americans of the time, could not swim; victims found that
their heavy wool clothing absorbed water and weighed them down in the river.
It has been suggested that the manager of the life preserver manufacturer
placed iron bars inside the cork preservers to meet minimum weight
requirements at the time. Many of the life preservers had been filled with
cheap and less effective granulated cork and brought up to proper weight by the
inclusion of the iron weights. Canvas covers, rotted with age, split and
scattered the powdered cork. Managers of the company were indicted but not
convicted. The life preservers had been manufactured in 1891 and had hung above
the deck, unprotected from the elements, for 13 years.
Captain Van Schaick decided to continue his course rather than run the ship
aground or stop at a nearby landing. By going into headwinds and failing to
immediately ground the ship, he fanned the fire. Van Schaick later argued he
was trying to avoid having the fire spread to riverside buildings and oil
tanks. Flammable paint also helped the fire spread out of control.
Some passengers jumped into the river to escape the fire, but the heavy women's
clothing of the day made swimming almost impossible and dragged them underwater
to drown. Many died when the floors of the overloaded boat collapsed; others
were battered by the still-turning paddles as they tried to escape into the
water or over the sides. By the time the General Slocum sank in
shallow water at North Brother Island, just off the Bronx shore, an estimated
1,021 people had either burned to death or drowned. There were 321 survivors.
Five of the 40 crew members died. The captain lost sight in one eye owing to
the fire. Reports indicate that Captain Van Schaick deserted the Slocum as soon
as it settled, jumping into a nearby tug, along with several crew. Some say
his jacket was hardly rumpled, but other reports stated that he was seriously
injured. He was hospitalized at Lebanon Hospital.
There were many acts of heroism among the passengers, witnesses, and emergency
personnel. Staff and patients from the hospital on North Brother Island
participated in the rescue efforts, forming human chains and pulling victims
from the water. = Aftermath=
Eight people were indicted by a Federal grand jury after the disaster: the
Captain; two inspectors; and the president, secretary, treasurer and
commodore of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company. Only Captain Van Schaick was
convicted. He was found guilty on one of three charges: criminal negligence, for
failing to maintain proper fire drills and fire extinguishers. The jury could
not reach a verdict on the other two counts of manslaughter. He was sentenced
to ten years imprisonment. He spent three years and six months at Sing Sing
prison before he was paroled. President Theodore Roosevelt declined to pardon
Captain Van Schaick. He was not released until the federal parole board under the
William Howard Taft administration voted to free him on August 26, 1911. He was
pardoned by President Taft on December 19, 1912. After his death in 1927,
Schaick was buried in Oakwood Cemetery. The Knickerbocker Steamship Company,
which owned the ship, paid a relatively small fine despite evidence they might
have falsified inspection records. The sunken remains of the General Slocum
were recovered and converted into a barge, which sank in a storm in 1911.
The disaster motivated federal and state regulation to improve the emergency
equipment on passenger ships. The neighborhood of Little Germany,
which had been in decline for some time before the disaster as residents moved
uptown, almost disappeared afterward. With the trauma and arguments that
followed the tragedy and the loss of many prominent settlers, most of the
Lutheran Germans remaining in the Lower East Side eventually moved uptown. The
church whose congregation chartered the ship for the fateful voyage was
converted to a synagogue in 1940 after the area was settled by Jewish
residents. The victims were interred in cemeteries
around New York, with fifty-eight identified victims buried in the
Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn. Several were buried at Lutheran Cemetery
in Middle Village, Queens. An annual memorial ceremony is held at the
historical marker. In 1906, a marble memorial fountain was
erected at Tompkins Square Park on Manhattan by the Sympathy Society of
German Ladies, with the inscription: "They are Earth's purest children, young
and fair." = Survivors=
On January 26, 2004, the last surviving passenger from the General Slocum,
Adella Wotherspoon, died at the age of 100. At the time of the disaster she was
a six-month-old infant. Wotherspoon was the youngest survivor of the tragedy
that took the lives of her two older sisters. When she was one year old she
unveiled the Steamboat Fire Mass Memorial on June 15, 1905, at Lutheran
All Faiths Cemetery, in Middle Village, Queens. Before Wotherspoon's death, the
previous oldest survivor was Catherine Connelly who was eleven years old at the
time of the accident. In popular culture
Literature 1922 – There are a couple of references
to the disaster in James Joyce's Ulysses, the events of which take place
on the following day. 1939 – Journalist Nat Ferber's
autobiography, "I found out: a confidential chronicle of the twenties,"
begins with his reporting on the General Slocum tragedy.
1996 – Eric Blau's novel The Hero of the Slocum Disaster is based on the
disaster; it was later adapted by Patrick Tull and Emily King into a one
man play 2000 – The story of the General Slocum
was described as an "Avoidable Catastrophe" in Bob Fenster's book, Duh!
The Stupid History of the Human Race, in Part One, which discusses stories
involving stupidity. 2003 – "Ship Ablaze"by Edward O'Donnell,
Broadway Books,ISBN 0-7679-0906-2, a definitive history of the event.
2003 – The disaster is featured in one of the chapters of author Clive
Cussler's book The Sea Hunters 2 when he finds the wreckage of the barge
Maryland, which was what the Slocum was converted to after it was salvaged.
2003 – The sinking of the General Slocum is mentioned in Pete Hamill's book,
Forever: A Novel. The main character describes it as the worst disaster in
New York history at the time that it occurred. He also marks it as the
turning point for when Germans left Kleindeutschland for Yorkville,
effectively vacating an area – the present day Lower East Side – that was
then taken over by Jews from Central Europe.
2004 – The 2005 Hugo Award-nominated novella "Time Ablaze" by Michael A.
Burstein concerns a time traveler who comes to record the disaster. The story
was published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster.
2006 – The General Slocum disaster is at the center of the novel Kiss Me, I'm
Dead, by J.G. Sandom, also published as The Unresolved' using the pen name of
T.K. Welsh. 2008 – The General Slocum disaster plays
a prominent role in Richard Crabbe's novel Hell's Gate
2009 – The General Slocum tragedy is described in detail in Glenn Stout's
2009 biography of Gertrude Ederle, Young Woman and the Sea. Stout uses the
incident, in which many women and young children drowned, to help explain the
history of how women, including Ederle, were afforded opportunities to learn to
swim during the early part of the century.
2010–2012 – The disaster plays a prominent role in the novels In the
Shadow of Gotham and Secret of the White Rose by Stefanie Pintoff.
2011 – The sinking and the spirits of the dead near the site of the sinking at
the Hell Gate Bridge are a major plot line in the supernatural novel Dead
Waters by Anton Strout. 2013 – In the Dean Koontz novel
Innocence, deaths caused by the sinking of the General Slocum prompted the
construction of secret rooms dedicated to the memory of a family lost.
Film, television, music 1904 – The American composer Charles
Ives wrote a tone poem The General Slocum, a musical portrait of the
disaster. 1915 – Regeneration is an early gangster
film directed by Raoul Walsh and produced by William Fox. The film was
lost until the 1970s. Regeneration has a lengthy scene in which an excursion
picnic ship burns in dramatic fashion while passengers jump overboard, an
obvious reference to the General Slocum disaster. Walsh shot the scene in New
York not too far from where the real disaster occurred.
1934 – The first scenes of the film Manhattan Melodrama recreate the
disaster. 1998 – German Television produced and
showed an hour-long documentary The Slocum is on Fire! by Christian
Baudissin about the disaster and its impact on the German community of New
York. 2001 – A description of the disaster and
the following events, in comparison with the September 11 attacks, is given by
David Rakoff in an episode of the radio program This American Life.
2002 – The General Slocum disaster was featured in the documentary My Father's
Gun 2004 - Ship Ablaze was a documentary
made by History Channel, with production help from NFL Films, featuring a filmed
reenactment of the disaster along with interviews of the two remaining General
Slocum survivors. The documentary borrows its name from the Edward
O'Donnell book. O'Donnell was also interviewed in the documentary.
2004 – "Fearful Visitation" New York's Great Steamboat Fire of 1904, Produced
by Philip Dray and Hank Linhart, running time
2004 – 53 minutes, premiered at the New-York Historical Society for the
100-year commemoration in 2004, and broadcast on PBS
2012 - The disaster was featured in Season 4, Episode 3 of the program
Mysteries at the Museum. See also
SS Eastland List of historic fires
Sultana disaster SS Lexington
References Explanatory notes
Citations Further reading
Braatz, Werner and Starr, Joseph. Fire on the River: The Story of the Burning
of the General Slocum. Krokodiloplis Press, 2000. ISBN 0-9749363-0-8
Nash, Jay. Darkest Hours. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976. ISBN 0-88229-140-8
O'Donnell, Ed. Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum.
Broadway, 2003. ISBN 0-7679-0905-4 External links
Brothers: NYC's worst maritime tragedy – Photos of the islands in 2004 and images
of the General Slocum from Forgotten New York.
General Slocum Steamboat Fire Mass Memorial, in Brooklyn
"Slocum Disaster". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
"The General Slocum Disaster" Chapter 7 from At Sea in the City: New York from
the Water's Edge by William Kornblum New York, NY Steamer General Slocum
Disaster, June 1904 at GenDisasters.com William Henry Van Schaick at Find a
Grave