Slocum Memorial Fountain

The excursion steamer General Slocum burned on June 15, 1904, causing the deaths of more than 1,000 people and, before September 11, 2001, standing as the deadliest disaster in New York City history. The loss devastated the Lower East Side community once known as Little Germany and remains the nation’s worst inland-waters peacetime tragedy. Built in 1891, the triple-decker wooden ship was named for General Henry Warner Slocum, who commanded the extreme right line of the Union Army at Gettysburg and later represented the City of Brooklyn in Congress for three terms. One of nearly a dozen excursion steamers serving New York waterways, it gave working-class people a brief escape from the city. On its final voyage, instead of its usual two trips to the Rockaways, it carried about 1,300 passengers and a crew of 35 to Locust Grove on Long Island, including the congregation of St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on 6th Street near 2nd Avenue, traveling to their seventeenth annual picnic. Because it was a weekday, many in the largely German immigrant and German-descended group were women and children, as were many of the other passengers from across the New York area. Twenty minutes after leaving the Third Street pier on the East River, the vessel entered the dangerous junction of the East River, New York Harbor, and Long Island Sound, where flames overtook it, and Captain William Van Schaik docked shortly after 10 a.m. at North Brother Island near Riker’s Island. Many of the dead were buried in the Lutheran cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, where a monument to the unidentified dead was erected in 1905. The disaster ended a ship long marked by accidents and was attributed to inadequate safety precautions and the captain’s negligence.

New York, New York · United States