The Sinking of the General Slocum

Today marks the tragic anniversary of the sinking of the General Slocum, which was ferrying over 1,000 German immigrants to a Sunday School picnic on Long Island when it went down in the East River on June 15, 1904.

We have blogged about the General Slocum in the past; you can read more about it at http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/06/general-slocum-disaster.html or, in more depth, in Inside the Apple.

General Slocum Disaster: June 15, 1904

One hundred and seven years ago, New York suffered the greatest tragedy in its history (up to that time), the sinking of the ship General Slocum in the East River.

We wrote about the ship in Inside the Apple and on our blog two years ago: http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2009/06/general-slocum-disaster.html

The Hoboken Pier Fire of 1900

One hundred and ten years ago, on June 30, 1900, one of the worst maritime disasters in New York history took place when a fire broke out at Pier 3 in Hoboken. The blaze, which may have started spontaneously in a bale of cotton, engulfed ships from the North German Lloyd Line, one of the most prestigious passenger ship companies of its day. By the end of the day somewhere between 325 and 400 people had been killed, many of them trapped inside the burning ships.

The fire broke out about 3:55 p.m. and despite the fact that the fire department was notified almost immediately, it was soon burning out of control. Four Lloyd Line ships were docked in Hoboken at the time, the Saale, Bremen, Main, and the line's flagship, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, then the largest passenger ship in the world. The Saale was scheduled to depart the next morning; the others were busy loading in coal for departures later in the week. The Kaiser Wilhelm also had a number of tourists aboard who had come to see the magnificent ship up close.

Within a few minutes, the fire had leaped from the pier to the Saale and within twenty minutes all four ships were on fire. The blaze was so huge that it could be seen from every office tower in Manhattan as well as from points south on the Jersey Shore. Dozens of ships in the harbor raced to aid of the burning vessels. The Kaiser Wilhelm, which carried the most passengers, was pulled into the Hudson. Though her bow and stern had caught fire, these blazes were soon brought under control and the ship was able to anchor safely in the river near 46th Street. All passengers and crew on the Kaiser Wilhelm were saved.

The same could not be said about the other ships. The Saale and Bremen (the two ships closest to the initial fire) had burned through their mooring lines and were adrift. The Saale floated down toward Governors Island and the Bremen floated toward Pier 18 (at today's South Street Seaport), where it set the pier on fire. In both ship, dozens of people were trapped and while they were able to open the portholes (or the glass had burst in the fire), they could not get out -- portholes in this era were only 11 inches wide.

The Saale was eventually towed to Communipaw, New Jersey, where she sank ten minutes after arrival. The Bremen and Main were tugged to Weehawken. The Kaiser Wilhelm had seen so little damage that she was put back in service almost immediately.* The Bremen and Main needed major repairs, but they, too, soon rejoined the Lloyd Line. But the Saale, the oldest of the four ships, was scrapped. In all over 27 ships were damaged that day in the fire, many of them tugboats that had come to the aid of the burning cruisers.

Just four years later, the General Slocum would catch fire in the East River leading to the death of 1,021 New Yorkers. These two events were instrumental in improving safety regulations on passenger ships in American waters.


* The Kaiser Wilhelm was converted into a military transport during World War I and sank off the coast of Africa.

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Read more about the General Slocum and New York's importance as a shipping city in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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The General Slocum disaster

Today (June 15, 2009) marks the 105th anniversary of the sinking of the General Slocum, a steamship that had been hired by St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kleindeutschland ("Little Germany") to take its parishioners on their annual Sunday School picnic.

(Though it was a Sunday School outing, it did not take place on a Sunday, as is sometimes erroneously reported; June 15th was a Wednesday.)

As we write in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City:

The...boat carried families from just about every block of the area surrounding Tompkins Square Park, the heart of the German neighborhood. The boat left from the pier at East Third Street around 9:30 in the morning and trouble developed almost immediately. A spark, probably from a stove, set the stern on fire; as the ship steamed up the East River, observers on either bank could see smoke and flames billowing from the vessel. Captain William Van Shaick could have headed for Manhattan, the Bronx, or Queens. Instead, he decided to make for North Brother Island, which lies in the East River near the entrance to the Long Island Sound. Captain Van Schaick, who survived the tragedy, later said that he’d hoped in doing this to keep the fire from spreading, but in fact he was piloting into a steady wind and the blaze quickly got out of control, enveloping the ship’s three decks, which then collapsed. Van Schaick may have also picked North Brother Island because of the hospital there (where Typhoid Mary would later spend the last two decades of her life). However, by the time the ship ran aground, the hospital staff could do little to help: most of the passengers had already drowned or burned to death.

Compounding the tragedy was the ship’s utter disregard for safety standards. Life preservers that were shoddily constructed in the first place had not been replaced in years. Mothers, hoping to save their children, bundled them into life preservers and threw them over the side only to watch them drown as the defective floatation devices became instantly water-logged and sank. The ship’s lifeboats could not be detached from the vessel and the crew had no instruction on how to handle a fire. Indeed, one of the only things Captain Van Schaik was ever punished for was lack of safety preparedness. (The jury refused to find him guilty of manslaughter.)

The official death toll stands at 1,021 though many--including Ed O'Donnell in Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum--calculate that the loss of life was even higher.

A small monument, which looks like a Greek funeral stele, stands in Tompkins Square Park to commemorate the children who lost their lives that day. But that is Kleindeutschland's only real marker to the event that changed that neighborhood--and New York--forever.

The event does make a few appearances in popular culture; perhaps most famously, it is mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses, which takes place entirely over the course of the next day, June 16, 1904. The sinking of the General Slocum is recreated in the film Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell (the latter who would go on to star in the Thin Man films) and it even inspired an unfinished classical piece by American composer Charles Ives.

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Much more about the General Slocum tragedy and New York's German community in the East Village can be found in Inside the Apple, including a walking tour of important German-American sites.

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