1904 Paddleboat Fire

They Were Earth's Purest Children, Young And Fair. Proudly wearing their Sunday school best, hundreds of them together boarded an East River excursion boat one sunny picnic morning in June 1904 — and together they perished, in a screaming horror that remains to this day the single worst disaster New York City has ever known.

The final toll of the General Slocum fire has never been fixed: 1,021 dead at least, perhaps 1,031, perhaps 30 more than that, and that number counts only those who were roasted or drowned in 30 awful minutes. Later, dozens of survivors committed suicide in their desolation; more yet were led vacant-eyed to mental wards. In the end, an entire neighborhood — a lively, laughing, gracious, prosperous, bustling lower East Side community called Weiss Garten — disappeared forever.

The "white garden" had taken its name from the clean white fences enclosing the Tompkins Square sector of the great German colony that had years earlier arisen between Houston and E. 14th Sts. on the riverfront. Germans had been in New York from the very beginning; old Peter Minuit himself had been a German. By 1904, there were three quarters of a million of them scattered about the city, fully a third of the metropolitan population, and the Weiss Garten, an enclave of the larger German community known since the 1840s as Kleindeutschland, was its spiritual center. At the very heart of the garden, on Sixth St. between First and Second Aves., was that which gave the hearty émigrés their affirmation and sustenance, the red-brick St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, a house of worship almost mystically revered in the old country as the first place any voyager would seek out upon arrival in the New World.

For a German child in early-century New York, the annual church picnic was the first of summer's sweet pleasures. At 9 o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, June 15, they gathered excitedly at the Third St. pier, the children and their mothers and aunts and grandmothers, perhaps 1,350 in all, and by 9:30 they were bound for Locust Grove on Huntington Bay for a day of Christian frolic. They were to be home, weary and elated, by nightfall. In less than an hour, most of them would be dead.

In those steamboat days, the General Slocum was one of the river's most colorfully familiar sights. Named for a Civil War officer who had gone on to Congress, it was a wonderful three-deck side paddler, and on this perfect picnic morning it was gaily pennanted and carried a merry oompah band that was already playing "Ein Fest Burg Ist Unser Gott" as it set out.

But it was a deathtrap, nothing but tinder and fresh paint and crumbling life preservers and the cheapest fire hose her owners could buy. It had not been inspected for years. Her crew had never known a fire drill. From the first instant someone smelled smoke, somewhere in the treacherous whirlpools of Hell Gate, there was never a hope for her.

Hundreds watched horrified from shore as the burning steamer continued upriver; why on earth was it not instantly putting into any one of the dozens of wharves between 125th and 135th Sts.? But elderly Capt. William Van Schaick had already determined to beach his boat on North Brother Island off 149th St., and there he remained steadfastly bound as the long minutes passed — and the General Slocum plowed full speed ahead directly into a brisk wind that sent great walls of oil-fed flames whipping from stacks to stern.

There was no escape for the picnickers. They died where they stood in the roaring flames. They died in the merciless currents into which they flung themselves. The terrible river ran thick with their bodies for days. Many were found locked in one another's arms.

Long lines of hearses jammed the black-creped streets of the lower East Side, and Kleindeutschland wailed with funerals. On Friday the 17th, there were hundreds of services at 37 churches — 114 at St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran alone. Then there were hundreds more on Saturday and Sunday.

"Built like a bonfire and certain to burn like one," snapped one newspaper of the General Slocum as the official inquiries got under way. But in fact there was little illegal about the Slocum; it was no more or less shoddy than any other working rivercraft. There were multiple criminal indictments — of her owners, of her crew, of federal steamboat inspectors — but in the end only sixty one year old Capt. William Van Schaick was convicted of negligence. Crippled and blinded in the accident, he served several years in Sing Sing; President William Howard Taft pardoned him at Christmas 1912, and he spent the rest of his life insisting that he had done everything he could to save his passengers.

In the wake of the Slocum disaster, maritime safety standards were considerably tightened. That was one of the doomed ship's legacies.

Another was the end of Kleindeutschland. Devastated, stripped forever of its gaiety, it fell swiftly apart as its mourning residents turned their backs on the place forever and fled uptown to Yorkville, to Astoria in Queens and to Brooklyn and the Bronx, surrendering their historic neighborhood to fast-incoming new waves of Russians and Poles. Never again in New York would there be so vibrant and close-knit a German Protestant community. All that remains is a small monument in Tompkins Square — They Were Earth's Purest Children, Young And Fair — in testimony to a perfect picnic morning long ago when laughter all at once turned to screams.

Last Updated: June 09, 1999