St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church chartered the PS General Slocum for its annual outing on June 15, 1904. It was a tradition that families in New York’s German neighborhood looked forward to every year. Mothers and children dressed for a day. They carried food, greeted friends, and walked toward the East Third Street pier. A band was waiting aboard the ship.
To the families stepping onto her decks, the General Slocum looked ready for them. She was a large and familiar excursion steamer with three decks, electric lights, and a brightly decorated interior. She had carried thousands of passengers around New York Harbor.
The General Slocum had passed a government safety inspection only weeks earlier. On paper, she was ready to carry passengers. She wasn’t. Her fire hoses were old and rotten. Her lifeboats were secured in place and would prove impossible to launch. Many of her life preservers were thirteen years old. The crew had never held a proper fire drill. Everything needed to save the passengers appeared to be aboard the ship. Almost none of it could be trusted.
The families now filling her decks knew none of this. To them, the General Slocum was simply the ship that would carry them away from New York City for a day. The neighborhood was known as Kleindeutschland. German immigrants had built churches, shops, clubs, and homes there. On that Wednesday morning, families from St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church were preparing for their annual Sunday school picnic. For many of them, it was one of the happiest days of the year. The ship filled up with passengers, predominantly women and children, to have a great day out.
The General Slocum left the East Third Street pier at about 9:30 that morning. Roughly half an hour later, as she passed East 90th Street and approached the dangerous waters of Hell Gate, smoke began rising from below the main deck.
The exact cause of the fire was never established. It appears to have started in or near the lamp room, where straw, oily rags, and lamp oil gave the flames plenty of fuel. A discarded match or cigarette may have started it, but no one could say for certain.
One of the first warnings reportedly came from a teenage passenger named Frank Perditski. After noticing smoke, he rushed into the pilothouse and tried to alert Captain William Van Schaick. The captain was concentrating on navigating Hell Gate and dismissed him. Another boy warned a deckhand, who stopped to investigate before notifying the mate. The mate then went to see the fire for himself before carrying the warning to the bridge. By the time Van Schaick received an official report, several valuable minutes had been lost.
The fire spread rapidly through the wooden ship. Some mothers placed life preservers on their children, believing they would keep them afloat, only to see them sink in the river. Many of the preservers were thirteen years old. Their canvas coverings split apart and released cork that had deteriorated into powder.
The clothing worn at the time made escape even harder. Women often wore long dresses, petticoats, corsets, and heavy shoes. Once soaked, those clothes became tremendously heavy. It is a detail easily overlooked today, but it contributed to the loss of life in this and other maritime disasters of the period.
After receiving the official warning, Van Schaick ordered full speed ahead. Within approximately thirty seconds, he directed the pilot toward North Brother Island. Investigators later faulted him for passing closer places where the ship might have been beached. Van Schaick maintained that he feared setting fire to waterfront buildings and oil tanks and believed North Brother Island offered the safest landing. Whatever his intentions, the ship’s speed and the headwind drove the flames toward the crowded stern.
When the burning ship reached North Brother Island, doctors, nurses, and even patients from Riverside Hospital rushed to the shoreline. Mary McCann, a teenage patient recovering from illness, entered the water and reportedly helped save several children.
Help also came from nearby Rikers Island. Two prisoners, John Merther and Dan Casey, persuaded their supervisor, Dr. Nathan E. Broder, to take them across in a rowboat. The three repeatedly pulled victims from the river, carried them to North Brother Island, and returned for more until they were too exhausted to continue.
Tugboats, fireboats, police boats, and private vessels converged on the scene. Several tug crews pressed their boats against portions of the Slocum that had not yet been consumed, allowing passengers to jump onto their lower decks. Others pulled survivors from the water as the burning ship came to rest against the island.
The exact number aboard and the final casualty count vary among historical sources. The figures most often given are 1,021 dead and only 321 survivors. Most of the victims were women and children.
The disaster devastated Kleindeutschland. Widowers and surviving families moved away, and some people reportedly took their own lives under the weight of their grief. The neighborhood was already changing, but the loss of so many families accelerated its decline. Although most of those aboard were German American, Jewish and Italian New Yorkers were also among the dead.
The investigation uncovered one final betrayal. Some of the cork supplied for life preservers had been mixed with cheaper granulated material. Pieces of iron had been inserted to bring the cork blocks up to the required weight. The devices had been made to satisfy an inspection requirement on paper, not necessarily to keep someone alive in the water. Managers of the cork company were indicted, but none was convicted.
There was enough blame to go around. Captain Van Schaick carried responsibility for the lack of fire drills and for never discovering that the equipment aboard his ship could not be trusted. The owners had failed to maintain and replace that equipment. Government inspectors then gave the public confidence in an unsafe ship by certifying her only weeks before the disaster. None of them needed to be a villain. The system allowed each of them to behave as though someone else had checked. Sometimes that is all it takes for a disaster to happen.
Ships do not have to be perfect. Neither do people. But when lives depend on safety equipment, “good enough” is not good enough. The passengers aboard the General Slocum trusted that the hoses would work, the lifebelts would float, and the inspection meant something. They deserved better!
The General Slocum disaster remains the deadliest maritime disaster in New York City history. Until September 11, 2001, it was the deadliest man-made disaster the city had ever experienced. Yet most people have never heard of it.
Today, the Slocum Memorial Fountain stands in Tompkins Square Park. Carved into its pink marble are the faces of two children and the words:
“They were Earth’s purest children, young and fair.”
