"Terrible affair that Gencral Socium explosion," James Joyce wrote in Ulysses, which took place entirely the day after the Slocum disaster. “Terrible, terrible. A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the fire hose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that…”
Few natural disasters have altered the face of New York in recorded history, but some manmade catastrophes have--none more so than the sinking of the coal-fired excursion steamboat General Slocum in 1904.
The 235-foot-long wooden side-wheeler, built in Brooklyn in 1891 and named for a Civil War general and New York congressman, had been chartered for Wednesday, June 15, by St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, which flanked Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. German immigrants are sometimes overlooked in the influx of Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews, but as early as the mid-nineteenth century, New York was home to more German-speakers than any other city except Berlin and Vienna.
As she was steaming up the East River near Ninetieth Street at about 9:30 AM to a church picnic at Eatons Neck on Long Island with about thirteen hundred passengers, mostly women and children, the General Slocum caught fire. Whatever the cause, oily rags and fuel fed the flames. By the time the boat sank off North Brother Island, more than a thousand people had died, either in the fire or in the water. Funerals went on for a week. One of the victims was three-year-old Anna Liebenow, whose body was recovered several days later. Her black leather shoes were kept by her sister, Adella, who was among the 321 known survivors, who mostly clung to rotted life preservers or swam to shore.
Of the eight people indicted by a federal grand jury, only the captain was convicted and only for criminal negligence. He served three and a half years of a ten-year sentence. Subsequent regulations improved passenger safety, and women (including Gertrude Ederle, who would become an Olympic champion and the first woman to swim the English Channel) were taught to swim. Little Germany was devastated by the disaster- the city's worst until 9/11 and its worst maritime accident ever. Most of its Lutheran German residents moved uptown to Yorkville and elsewhere to escape the memory. The tragedy was marked by a memorial at Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, and by a marble fountain in Tompkins Square Park, which carries the inscription "They are Earth's purest children, young and fair." The last surviving passenger died in 2004. She was six months old when the General Slocum sank. Her two elder sisters--one was Anna Liebenow-died in the accident.
