Down in Flames: The General Slocum Disaster

By Thomas Dimopoulos

Edwin Weaver bunked down for the night alongside some of his shipmates
aboard the General Slocum on a Tuesday evening in June 1904,
just as the paddle-wheel excursion steamer sat tied to the 50th Street
dock in New York Harbor.

The 28-year-old Troy man served as second pilot on the 250-foot vessel
that boasted three passenger decks and was made almost entirely of wood.
Weaver was a long way from his 12th Street home in the Collar City.

The crew and deck hands rested in preparation for the following
morning’s excursion with the St. Mark’s German Lutheran Church group,
headed for its annual Long Island picnic.

The sun came up over the East River on the morning of Wednesday, June
15. On the Lower East Side neighborhood nicknamed “Little Germany,”
mothers gathered up their children for the annual outing.

The heavily populated German district ran from the Bowery to the East
River and sprawled north all the way to 14th Street.

At 8 a.m., the church pastor waited at the Third Street pier in
Manhattan to welcome each of the passengers as they boarded the ship.
there were 1,358 of them. More than 1,200 were women and children.

What they couldn’t have known as they were greeted by the Rev. George
Hass and boarded the vessel, was that for the most of them, it would be
the last time they would ever set foot on land.

At 9:30 a.m., the ship left the pier and steamed north, up the East
River, following the route between the East Side of Manhattan and
western Queens. The voyage would pass the series of small islands:
Blackwells (today’s renamed Roosevelt Island), Ward’s Island and
Randall’s Island. It would pass the narrow straits of Hell Gate,
originally named by the Dutch generations earlier, for its peril to
ships with its heavy currents and dangerous, jagged rock that critically
damaged a British frigate a century earlier resulting in 70 deaths.

As the Slocum steamed north, a band performed on the promenade deck
playing upbeat music to match the sunny june morning. The ship’s three
decks were filled with passengers. The very young were cradled in their
mother’s arms, while the other children played games on the deck below.

A half-hour into the journey came the ominous cries of “Fire!”

Smoke billowed onto the deck. The blaze climbed the staircase, from
below, the source a forward cabin beneath the main deck that served as a
lamp room, storing the dangerous combination of barrels filled with oil
and packing hay.

Many of the crew members were inexperienced, hired on as inexpensive
labor. They spotted the fire, but failed to immediately notify the
captain, attempting instead to extinguish the flames on their own. They
grabbed fire hoses, but their inferior quality caused them to burst
altogether.

As the ship crossed the entrance to Hell Gate, bystanders on the Queens
shore looked on horrified as smoke billowed from the ship. They pointed
frantically, attempting to alert the passengers as the flames began to
engulf the front side of the ship. Panic followed.

Mothers screamed for their young as they ran from the flames and
gathered toward the back side of the ship. Life preservers were grabbed,
but those tore apart, the rotted insides crumbling in their hands. The
ship’s lifeboats were lowered from their holdings.

Among the panic, Capt. William Van Schaick decided to speed the ship
ahead instead of docking on adjacent land. The wind fanned the flames as
the ship steamed between the Queens and Manhattan shorelines, its fiery
bow pointed at the shore of North Brother Island.

Most of the passengers, many dressed in their Sunday best, could not
swim. Mothers clung to their youngest amid the smoke and flames and when
the fire tore at their clothes, many dropped their babies overboard,
then leapt into the water after them.

The fiery nose of the ship hit the shore and part of the deck collapsed
trapping a number of passengers underneath.

The ones who escaped ran to the rear of the ship, but it was only a
temporary respite. They were faced with the choice of either jumping, or
facing the flames.

“Between 400 and 500 Dead,” read the headline of The Daily Saratogian on
June 15, 1904. The story described a horrid scene. The captain, after
swimming safely ashore, was arrested along with the First Pilot and the
Second Pilot — Edwin Weaver of Troy. Through the night, the body count
rose. “The magnitude of yesterday’s story of death,” read the following
day’s edition of The Daily Saratogian, “has been growing with every
passing hour.”

It also reported the scene in the aftermath: “Almost 250
feet from the New York Shore of the place known as Hunt’s Point, the
upper part of a paddle box, two smoke stacks, a scorched flagstaff and
some twisted and bent ironwork mark where lie the remnants of the
ill-fated steamboat, It is a temporary and hideous monument.”

Capt. Van Schaik spent three years in prison following the Slocum
disaster, which was the worst New York City tragedy until Sept. 11,
2001.
The tally of the dead was 1,021.
More than 60 bodies remained unidentified and for those, a procession of horse-drawn hearses carried them to their final resting place at the
Lutheran Cemetery in Queens.

The German settlement of the Lower East Side of Manhattan was devastated
and its remaining residents relocated to other areas as the downtown
neighborhood known as “Little Germany” was forever gone.
Thousands of miles away, James Joyce would note the tragedy
in the pages of his book, “Ulysses.”

A year after the disaster a monument was unveiled at the Lutheran
Cemetery site. The Slocum’s youngest survivor, Adella Liebnow – who was
6-months-old when the ship went down – was part of the cemetery. She
lived to be the oldest survivor of the tragedy, passing away two months
after her 100th birthday in January, 2004.

Published in The Saratogian on the 100th anniversary
of the General Slocum tragedy, June, 2004.