Southern Piers:

Hoboken’s founding father, Colonel John Stevens, designed an iron-clad warship in 1813 that his surviving sons attempted to build beginning in 1843 in a drydock just south of Second Street near Hudson Street, but the vessel, known as the Stevens’ Battery, was never completed. In the mid-19th century, the shoreline lay farther inland, and River Street and the piers that later became home to the North German Lloyd Steamship Line did not yet exist; landfill created space for streets, piers, and buildings. North German Lloyd was one of the two major German passenger lines that made Hoboken its American home port from the 1870s until World War I, and its ships were among the largest, fastest, and most stylish of the era. Alongside first-class travel, the line offered lower-class and steerage passage to many immigrants from Germany who were escaping social and political difficulties and hard economic times. With an established German community, Hoboken was a natural home for these immigrants; in 1890, 41% of residents were of German heritage, and German-language writers used the name “Little Bremen” for Hoboken. On June 30th, 1900, a fire that started aboard a North German Lloyd ship engulfed several vessels and destroyed the piers; with over 300 deaths, it remains one of America’s worst maritime disasters. Fireproof piers were built to replace them and lasted until the 1990s.

Hoboken, New Jersey · United States