The Greatest Loss of Life in NYC in the 20th Century

The Paddlewheel Steamer General Slocum, an "excursion steamer", caught fire and burned in the East River on this day in 1904. There were over 1,300 passengers, mainly women and children, on the ship, possibly more. Most of them, over 1,000 died. She had been chartered for the day by the St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, whose congregants were mainly German-Americans. Each year, they chartered an excursion steamer for a picnic on the north shore of Long Island.

For reasons good or ill, the captain didn't immediately head for shore. The lifejackets were rotted, the lifeboats had been painted into the davits and were immovable. Those who stayed on board died in the fire, those who jumped into the river drowned, as most couldn't swim and the heavy clothing worn back then worked to drag the wearers under.

Among the dead was a NYPD officer, Tom Cooney. He and his partner commandeered a tugboat to rescue people. Cooney jumped into the river and brought a lot of survivors to the tugboat. He drowned on his last rescue. Other cops in boats rescued more people, one NYPD boat put itself up against the burning ship in order to save people, but only a little over 300 survived. The NYPD's Harbor Unit and other watermen spent days pulling bodies out of the river.

Back then, immigrants lived in clusters; they stuck together for their own support and protection. The Slocum fire tore the heart out of the Lower East Side German-American community known as Kleindeutschland (Weissgarten was its central neighborhood, as it was surrounded by white wooden fences). Surviving families often fell apart. In what should come as a surprise to nobody nowadays, suicides were not uncommon. The residents eventually dispersed, many moving north to another Manhattan neighborhood, Yorkville.

The Slocum fire, though, while not exactly forgotten, never captured the popular imagination beyond New York City. Unlike the Titanic disaster some years later, there weren't famous rich victims. The victims of the Slocum fire were mainly German immigrants, a group that would not exactly be favored by the middle of the century.

The documentary Fearful Visitation was released in 2004 and posted on YT a few years ago:

It covers a bit of the history of Kleindeutschland.