Remembering the General Slocum Disaster 120 Years Later

If one were to make a 1970s-style disaster movie about old New York, the 1904 burning of the ferry boat PS General Slocum would have to make anyone’s short list of possible subjects. Imagine The Poseidon Adventure on the East River and— God help us— hopefully Shelley Winters would survive this watery ordeal too.

It happened on the warm, sunny morning of Wednesday June 15. A large group of mostly women and children were going on a cruise to the Locust Grove Picnic Ground, on Eaton’s Neck, Long Island. The trip was organized by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church at 323 East 6th Street. This edifice today is the Sixth Street Community Synagogue but then the parish was a focal point of the East Side community known as “Kleines Deutschland”—Little Germany.

Their means of conveyance for this trip was the PS General Slocum, a 264-foot-long sidewheel steamboat built in Brooklyn in 1891 for the Knickerbocker Steam Company and named for the famed Union Civil War General Henry Warner Slocum.

Born in Onondaga County, New York, in 1827, he went to school in Albany and at age 16, he himself became a teacher, an occupation he continued for the next five years. In 1848, Slocum received an appointment to West Point, from which he graduated in 1852. After serving four years in the Army, Slocum resigned his commission to study law and was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1859. When the Civil War began, Slocum was appointed a colonel of the 27th New York Infantry and would fight in many of the conflict’s major battles, from First Bull Run—where he was seriously wounded—to Seven Days, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Atlanta campaign and Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea.

After the war, Slocum moved to Brooklyn, where he became much involved in the city’s civic improvement, including the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the management of railroad lines. Twice elected to Congress as a Democrat, when Slocum passed away from liver disease on April 14, 1894, the top headline in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was “SLOCUM IS DEAD–The Great Commander Expired Early This Morning–BROOKLYN LOSES A DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN.”

This was quite a legacy to live up to and, while things would look different in retrospect, there was no known public cause to question the Slocum’s safety. The ship’s captain, 61-year-old William Van Schaick, was highly experienced seaman with no past record of impropriety.

Indeed, there was no reason to believe this journey would be of any moment beyond the festiveness of the occasion. The Slocum’ s day began at its pier at the Battery, which it departed, with a few hundred excursionists, at around 7 a.m.

The Slocum arrived at the East 3rd Street pier at around 8 a.m. A German band played on deck while nearly a thousand more people came on board. At the time of the Slocum’s 9:30 a.m. departure, there were around 1350 people on board, including at least 300 happy, well-dressed children under the age of 10 travelling without tickets.

After Captain Van Schaik eased his ship deeper into the river, the band played the popular Lutheran hymn, “Eine Fest Burg Ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress is Our God”) and soon the Slocum began steaming north.

After passing west of Blackwell Island (Roosevelt Island today), the ship turned east, staying south of Ward’s Island for the trip through Hell’s Gate from where it would again head east into Long Island Sound.

Though Captain Van Schaik didn’t yet know it, his ship was already ablaze, the fire having started in a storeroom with gasoline, paint and other flammable materials. Though the smoke rising through the lower decks’ floorboards alarmed some crew members, the deathly seriousness of the blaze wasn’t immediately recognized.

It’s likely that shipyard workers and others on the Astoria, Queens, shore, seeing the puffs of smoke emerging knew the Slocum was on fire before many of its passengers did. Indeed, one dredge captain, William Alloway, let off four whistle blasts trying to warm the Slocum, and wondered why they didn’t make an emergency stop right there.

The conflagration spread quickly, the Slocum was a cacophony of fire gongs, crackling flames, panic, as the ship’s firehoses failed and terror, as many mothers—many of whom couldn’t swim—and kids plunged into the water.

One contemporary account captured a scene beyond words:

“Screams came from the water. A woman looked over and saw three children floating by on the starboard side. The head of one of them was covered in blood where a blade of the paddlewheel had wounded it. The woman screamed just once, so loud that for a moment all the other horrible sounds of the boat seemed hushed. She pointed a finger at the little bodies that were floating back from the forward decks.”

“Frieda!” she screamed “Meine Frieda!”

Though nearby boatmen on the river were following the Slocum attempting to rescue the jumpers their success was limited.

Captain Van Schaik unsure whether to try to land in the Port Morris section of the Bronx or on North Brother Island chose the latter course.

Recognizing this, the staff of that island’s Riverside Hospital, which served as a quarantine site for patients with typhoid and other contagious diseases, quickly prepared to respond for the Slocum’s arrival. This occurred when Captain Van Schaick roughly ran the sidewheel inferno aground about twenty-five feet from shore.

The horror of what had just occurred— even for people who still had strong memories of the Civil War—was obvious and would only grow worse as the bodies were counted and identified. “East Side A District of Woe” read one June 17 headline.

There would be trials, hearings and many recriminations, especially against the steamboat company and crew (“No New Life Preservers on the Slocum since 1895” read one infuriating headline) and sorrow.

Scapegoated, Captain Van Schaik would serve 3 ½ years in Sing Sing but was eventually pardoned by President Taft in 1912.

A modest—some might say too modest—Slocum Memorial Fountain, donated by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies, was installed in Tompkins Square Park in 1906. In large part, “Little Germany” would never recover, and the center of German Manhattan would move uptown to Yorkville.

All told, the Slocum disaster was the greatest loss of life in New York City since the Brooklyn Theatre Fire of December 5, 1876, which killed at least 300 people and would remain so until the events of September 11, 2001.

It would take literature to provide a memorial commensurate with the events of June 14, 1904. It was a novel by James Joyce, published in February 1922, title Ulysses. Set in Dublin, Ireland, the book takes place in single day, June 16, 1904—when the news of the Slocum tragedy was a worldwide bombshell.

“I’ll just take a thimbleful of your best gin, Mr. Crimmins. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst.”

In 2004, media artist and professor Hank Linhart and historian Philip Dray collaborated on Fearful Visitation, a 52-minute documentary film on the Slocum disaster that aired on PBS New York and other stations. It includes interviews with two women who are believed to have been the last two Slocum survivors, then aged 99 and 105.