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History
Name	General Slocum
Namesake	Henry Warner Slocum
Owner	Knickerbocker Steamship Company
Port of registry	United States
Builder	Devine Burtis, Jr., of Brooklyn, New York
Laid down	December 23, 1890
Launched	April 18, 1891
Maiden voyage	June 25, 1891
Out of service	1904 (sank); 1911 (sank)
Fate	Caught fire and sank in the East River of New York City on June 15, 1904. Remains salvaged and converted into a barge; sank 1911.
General characteristics
Class and type	Sidewheeler passenger ship
Tonnage	1,284 grt
Length	235 ft (72 m)
Beam	37.5 ft (11.4 m)
Depth	12.3 ft (3.7 m)
Decks	three decks
Installed power	1 × 53 in bore, 12 ft stroke single cylinder vertical beam steam engine
Propulsion	Sidewheel boat each wheel had 26 paddles and was 31 ft (9.4 m) in diameter.
Speed	16 knots (30 km/h)
Crew	22

The PS General Slocum was a passenger steamboat built in Brooklyn, New York, in 1891. The General Slocum was named for Civil War General and New York Congressman Henry Warner Slocum. She operated in the New York City area as an excursion steamer for the next thirteen years under the same ownership. During her service history, she was involved in a number of mishaps, including multiple groundings and collisions.

On June 15, 1904, the General Slocum caught fire and sank in the East River of New York City. At the time of the accident she was on a chartered run carrying members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church (German Americans from Little Germany, Manhattan) to a church picnic. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board died. The General Slocum disaster was the New York area's worst disaster in terms of loss of life until the September 11, 2001 attacks, and remains the worst maritime disaster in the city's history. The events surrounding the General Slocum fire have appeared in a number of books, plays and movies.

Construction and design

The General Slocum was built by Devine Burtis, Jr., a Brooklyn boatbuilder who was awarded the contract on February 15, 1891. Her keel was 235 feet (72 m) long and the hull was 37.5 feet (11.4 m) wide constructed of white oak and yellow pine. The Slocum measured 1,284 tons gross, and had a hull depth of 12.3 feet (3.7 m). The Slocum was constructed with three decks, three watertight compartments and 250 electric lights.

General Slocum was powered by a single-cylinder, surface condensing vertical beam steam engine with 53 inch bore and 12 foot stroke, built by W. & A. Fletcher Company of Hoboken, New Jersey. Steam was supplied by two boilers at a working pressure of 52 psi. The Slocum was a sidewheel boat. Each wheel had 26 paddles and was 31 feet (9.4 m) in diameter. Her maximum speed was about 16 knots (30 km/h). The ship was usually manned by a crew of 22, including Captain William H. Van Schaick and two pilots.

Service history

The General Slocum experienced a series of mishaps following her launch in 1891. Four months after her launching, she ran aground off Rockaway. Tugboats had to be used to pull her free.

A number of incidents occurred during 1894. On July 29, while returning from Rockaway with approximately 4,700 passengers, the Slocum struck a sandbar with enough force that her electrical generator went out. The next month, the Slocum again ran aground off Coney Island during a storm. During this grounding the passengers had to be transferred to another ship. In September 1894 the Slocum collided with the tug R. T. Sayre in the East River with the General Slocum sustaining substantial damage to her steering.

In July 1898, another collision occurred when the Slocum collided with the Amelia near Battery Park. On August 17, 1901, while carrying what was described as 900 intoxicated Paterson anarchists, some of the passengers started a riot on board and attempted to take control of the vessel. However, the crew fought back and maintained control of the ship. The captain docked the ship at the police pier and 17 men were taken into custody by the police. In June 1902 the General Slocum ran aground with 400 passengers aboard. With the vessel unable to be freed, the passengers had to camp out while the ship remained stuck throughout the night.

The 1904 disaster

The General Slocum worked as a passenger ship, taking people on excursions around New York City. On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, the ship had been chartered for $350 by St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Little Germany district of Manhattan. This was an annual rite for the group, which had made the trip for 17 consecutive years even as German settlers deserted Little Germany for the Upper East and West Sides. Over 1,400 passengers, mostly women and children, boarded the Slocum, which was to sail up the East River and then eastward across the Long Island Sound to Locust Grove, a picnic site in Eatons Neck, Long Island.

The ship got underway at 9:30 a.m. As it was passing East 90th Street, a fire started in the Lamp Room in the forward section, possibly caused by a discarded cigarette or match, but certainly fueled by the straw, oily rags, and lamp oil strewn around the room. The first notice of a fire was at 10:00 a.m.; eyewitnesses claimed the initial blaze began in various locations, including a paint locker filled with flammable liquids and a cabin filled with gasoline. Captain Van Schaick was only notified ten minutes after the fire was discovered. A 12-year-old boy had tried to warn him earlier but was not believed.

Although the captain was ultimately responsible for the safety of passengers, no effort had been made to maintain or replace the ship's safety equipment. The fire hoses had been allowed to rot, and fell apart when the crew attempted to put out the fire. Likewise, the crew had never had a fire drill, and the lifeboats were tied up (some claim they were wired and painted in place) and inaccessible. Survivors reported that the life preservers were useless and fell apart in their hands. Desperate mothers placed life jackets on their children and tossed them into the water, only to watch in horror as their children sank instead of floating. Most of those on board were women and children who, like most Americans of the time, could not swim; even victims who did not don the worthless life preservers found that their heavy wool clothing weighed them down in the water.

It has been suggested that the manager of the life preserver manufacturer actually placed iron bars inside the cork preservers to meet minimum weight requirements at the time. Many of the life preservers had been filled with cheap and less effective granulated cork and brought up to proper weight by the inclusion of the iron weights. Canvas covers, rotted with age, split and scattered the powdered cork. Managers of the company (Nonpareil Cork Works) were indicted but not convicted. The life preservers had been manufactured in 1891 and had hung above the deck, unprotected from the elements, for 13 years.

Captain Van Schaick decided to continue his course rather than run the ship aground or stop at a nearby landing. By going into headwinds and failing to immediately ground the ship, he actually fanned the fire. (Van Schaick would later argue he was attempting to prevent the fire from spreading to riverside buildings and oil tanks.) Flammable paint also helped the fire spread out of control.

Some passengers attempted to jump into the river, but the heavy women's clothing of the day made swimming almost impossible and dragged them underwater to drown. Many died when the floors of the overloaded boat collapsed; others were battered by the still-turning paddles as they attempted to escape into the water or over the sides.

By the time the General Slocum sank in shallow water at North Brother Island, just off the Bronx shore, an estimated 1,021 people had either burned to death or drowned, with 321 survivors. Five of the 40 crew members died. The captain lost sight in one eye owing to the fire. Reports indicate that Van Schaick deserted the Slocum as soon as it settled, jumping into a nearby tug, along with several crew. Some say his jacket was hardly rumpled, but other reports stated that he was seriously injured. He was hospitalized at Lebanon Hospital.

There were many acts of heroism among the passengers, witnesses, and emergency personnel. Staff and patients from the hospital on North Brother Island participated in the rescue efforts, forming human chains and pulling victims from the water.

Aftermath

Eight people were indicted by a Federal grand jury after the disaster: the Captain; two inspectors; and the president, secretary, treasurer and commodore of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company. Only Captain Van Schaick was convicted. He was found guilty on one of three charges: criminal negligence, failing to maintain proper fire drills and fire extinguishers. The jury could not reach a verdict on the other two counts of manslaughter. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. He spent three years and six months at Sing Sing prison before he was paroled. President Theodore Roosevelt declined to pardon Captain Van Schaick, and he was not released until the federal parole board, under the William Howard Taft administration, voted to free him on August 26, 1911. He was pardoned by President Taft on December 19, 1912, and died in 1927.

The Knickerbocker Steamship Company, which owned the ship, paid a relatively small fine despite evidence they might have falsified inspection records. The sunken remains of the General Slocum were recovered and converted into a barge, which sank in a storm in 1911.

The disaster motivated federal and state regulation to improve the emergency equipment on passenger ships.

The neighborhood of Little Germany, which had been in decline for some time before the disaster, almost disappeared afterwards. With the trauma and arguments that followed the tragedy and the loss of many prominent settlers, most of the Lutheran Germans remaining in the Lower East Side eventually moved uptown. The church whose congregation chartered the ship for the fateful voyage is now a synagogue.

The victims were interred in cemeteries around New York, with fifty-eight identified victims buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn. Several were buried at Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens (now Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery), where an annual memorial ceremony is held.

In 1906, a marble memorial fountain was erected at Tompkins Square Park on Manhattan by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies, with the inscription: "They are Earth's purest children, young and fair."

Survivors

On January 26, 2004, the last surviving passenger from the General Slocum, Adella Wotherspoon (née Liebenow), died at the age of 100. At the time of the disaster she was a six-month-old infant. Wotherspoon was the youngest survivor of the tragedy that took the lives of her two older sisters. When she was one year old she unveiled the Steamboat Fire Mass Memorial on June 15, 1905, at Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery, in Middle Village, Queens. Before Wotherspoon's death, the previous oldest survivor was Catherine Connelly (née Uhlmyer) (1893–2002) who was eleven years old at the time of the accident.

In popular culture

Print

• 1922 – There are a couple of references to the disaster in James Joyce's Ulysses, the events of which take place on the following day (June 16, 1904).
• 1939 – Journalist Nat Ferber's autobiography, "I found out: a confidential chronicle of the twenties," begins with his reporting on the General Slocum tragedy.
• 1996 – Eric Blau's novel The Hero of the Slocum Disaster is based on the disaster; it as later adapted by Patrick Tull and Emily King into a one man play
• 2000 – The story of the General Slocum was described as an "Avoidable Catastrophe" in Bob Fenster's book, Duh! The Stupid History of the Human Race, in Part One, which discusses stories involving stupidity.
• 2003 – The disaster is featured in one of the chapters of author Clive Cussler's novel The Sea Hunters 2 when he finds the wreckage of the barge Maryland, which was what the Slocum was converted to after it was salvaged.
• 2004 – The 2005 Hugo Award-nominated novella "Time Ablaze" by Michael A. Burstein (Analog, June 2004) concerns a time traveler who comes to record the disaster. The story was published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster.
• 2006 – The General Slocum disaster is at the center of the novel The Unresolved, by T.K. Welsh.
• 2008 – The General Slocum disaster plays a prominent role in Richard Crabbe's novel Hell's Gate
• 2009 – The General Slocum tragedy is described in detail in Glenn Stout's 2009 biography of Gertrude Ederle, Young Woman and the Sea. Stout uses the incident, in which many women and young children drowned, to help explain the history of how women, including Ederle, were afforded opportunities to learn to swim during the early part of the century.
• 2010–2012 – The disaster plays a prominent role in the novels In the Shadow of Gotham (2010) and Secret of the White Rose (2012) by Stefanie Pintoff.
• 2011 – The sinking and the spirits of the dead near the site of the sinking at the Hell Gate Bridge are a major plot line in the supernatural novel Dead Waters by Anton Strout.

Film, television, music

• 1904 – The American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) wrote a tone poem The General Slocum, a musical portrait of the disaster.
• 1915 – Regeneration is an early gangster film directed by Raoul Walsh and produced by William Fox. The film was lost until the 1970s. Regeneration has a lengthy scene in which an excursion picnic ship burns in dramatic fashion while passengers jump overboard, an obvious reference to the General Slocum disaster. Walsh shot the scene in New York not too far from where the real disaster occurred.
• 1934 – The first scenes of the film Manhattan Melodrama recreate the disaster.
• 1998 – German Television produced and showed an hour-long documentary The Slocum is on Fire! by Christian Baudissin about the disaster and its impact on the German community of New York.
• 2001 – A description of the disaster and the following events, in comparison with the September 11 attacks, is given by David Rakoff in an episode of the radio program This American Life.
• 2002 – The General Slocum disaster was featured in the documentary My Father's Gun

See also

• SS Eastland
• List of historic fires
• Sultana disaster
• SS Lexington

References

1. Historical plaque at the location of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church. Retrieved October 6, 2010. Full text of the plaqueGENERAL SLOCUM DISASTER CENTENNIAL

   1904–2004

   This is the site of the former St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church (1857–1940) a mostly
   German immigrant parish. On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, the church chartered the excursion
   steamer, GENERAL SLOCUM, to take the members on the 17th annual Sunday school picnic.
   The steamer sailed up the East River, with some 1400 passengers aboard, when it
   entered the infamous Hell Gate passage, caught fire and was beached and sank on
   North Brother Island. It is estimated 1200 people lost their lives,
   mostly woman and children, dying within yards of the Bronx shore.

   The GENERAL SLOCUM had been certified by the U.S. Steam boat Inspection Service
   to safely carry 2500 passengers five weeks before the disaster. An investigation after the fire
   and sinking found the lifeboats were wired and glued with paint to the deck, life jackets
   fell apart with age, fire hoses burst under water pressure, and the crew never had a fire drill.

   Until the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001,
   the Slocum disaster had been the largest fire fatality in New York City's history.

   Dedicated Sunday, June 13, 2004, by the Steam Centennial Committee.

   The Maritime Indistry Museum

   SUNY-Maritime College, Fort Schulyer, The Bronx, NY

1. "The General Slocum An Unlucky Craft. Has Had Collisions And Accidents By The Score. Has Run Ashore Many Times. She Was a Crack Harbor Boat Thirteen Years Ago. Capt. Van Schaick's Good Record". New York Times. June 16, 1904. Retrieved February 28, 2010. The General Slocum was one of the best known vessels about New York Harbor. Since the time of her launching, in 1891, she has been employed in so many different capacities, and on so many different runs, that possibly five out of every ten people in New York City have at some time been aboard of her, or have seen her at close range. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
2. Kleinfeld, N. R. (September 2, 2007). "A Debate Rises: How Much 9/11 Tribute Is Enough?". New York Times. Retrieved April 13, 2009. Few are alive anymore who can recall June 15, 1904, when 1,021 people died in the burning and sinking of the steamer General Slocum, the deadliest New York disaster until Sept. 11, 2001.
3. ^ Ogilvie, J.S. "History of the General Slocum Disaster:". Retrieved December 13, 2009. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
4. Cussler, Clive, General Slocum, National Underwater and Marine Agency. Retrieved November 26, 2010.
5. "A Very Handsome Boat", The New York Times, June 26, 1891.
6. O'Donnell, Edward (2003). "Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat "General Slocum". New York: Broadway Books. pp. 97–98. ISBN 0-7679-0905-4.
7. O'Donnell, pp.98–102.
8. ^ O'Donnell, pp. 108–113.
9. O'Donnell, pp. 118–119.
10. Gentile, "Shipwrecks of New Jersey", 2001
11. Eric Robinson, New-York Historical Society Library
12. "Van Schaick Pardoned. Captain of the Ill-Fated Slocum Is Restored to Full Citizenship". The New York Times. December 20, 1912. Retrieved April 13, 2009. President Taft to-day granted a pardon to Capt. William H. Van Schaick, who commanded the steamboat General Slocum, destroyed by fire in the East River in 1904, with the loss of 1,030 lives, most of whom were women and children. The pardon becomes effective on Christmas day.
13. William Henry Van Schaick (1837–1927) – Find A Grave Memorial
14. O'Donnell, pp. 26–34
15. The General Slocum Disaster « The Evergreens Cemetery
16. Wingfield, Valerie (June 13, 2011). "The General Slocum Disaster of June 15, 1904". NYC Neighborhoods : Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Retrieved February 10, 2013.
17. "Thousands Sob as Baby Unveils Slocum Statue". The New York Times. June 16, 1905. Retrieved June 26, 2007. Ten thousand persons saw through their tears a baby with a doll tucked under her arm unveil the monument to the unidentified dead of the Slocum disaster yesterday afternoon in the Lutheran Cemetery, Middle Village, L.I.
18. Rakoff, David (September 21, 2001). "Episode 194: Before and After: Act Two: Watching From The River's Edge". This American Life. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)

Further reading

• Jay Nash, Darkest Hours. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976. ISBN 0-88229-140-8
• Werner Braatz and Joseph Starr, Fire on the River: The Story of the Burning of the General Slocum. Krokodiloplis Press, 2000. ISBN 0-9749363-0-8
• Ed O'Donnell, Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum. Broadway, 2003. ISBN 0-7679-0905-4

External links

• Brothers: NYC's worst maritime tragedy — Photos of the islands in 2004 and images of the General Slocum from Forgotten New York.
• General Slocum Steamboat Mass memorial monument at Find-A-Grave
• "Slocum Disaster" . Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
• "The General Slocum Disaster" Chapter 7 from At Sea in the City: New York from the Water's Edge by William Kornblum (by permission of the publisher)

• 1891 ships
• 1904 fires
• Engineering failures
• Fires in New York City
• German-American history
• History of New York City
• Maritime incidents in the United States
• Maritime incidents in 1904
• Ships built in New York
• Paddle steamers of the United States
• Passenger ships of the United States
• PS General Slocum
• Rockaway, Queens
• Ship fires
• Shipwrecks of the East River
• Transportation accidents in New York City