The East River Excursion Steamer That Caught Fire on 15 June 1904 With Approximately 1,300 German-American Picknickers Aboard and Killed 1,021 of Them

The neighbourhood known as Kleindeutschland (“Little Germany”) covered approximately 50 square blocks of the Lower East Side around Tompkins Square Park. By 1904 it was the largest German-speaking community in the United States — approximately 70,000 first- and second-generation German immigrants centred on a Lutheran parish life that included St Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church at East Sixth Street and Second Avenue.

The St Mark’s annual summer Sunday-school picnic was held each June at the Locust Grove picnic grounds on Long Island’s North Shore. The 1904 picnic was scheduled for 15 June 1904. The parish had chartered the side-wheel paddle steamer PS General Slocum of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company at a fee of $350. The Slocum would carry the picnickers from the East Third Street pier up the East River, through Hell Gate, into Long Island Sound, and east along the Long Island shore to Locust Grove.

Approximately 1,300 picnickers boarded the Slocum that morning. Most were women and children — Sunday-school members and their mothers, plus the parish minister Pastor George Haas. The men of the parish were at work; this was a weekday. The Slocum departed at approximately 9:00 a.m.

10:00 a.m.

A 14-year-old passenger named Frank Perditski was the first to notice smoke rising from a storage compartment beneath the forward main deck at approximately 10:00 a.m., as the Slocum was passing East 90th Street on the Manhattan side of the East River. He told the deckhand John Coakley. Coakley opened the compartment door, saw flames, closed the door without raising an alarm, and went to find the captain.

The captain, William van Schaick (66, a 40-year river-steamer veteran), was on the bridge approximately 150 feet aft of the storage compartment. By the time Coakley reached him the fire was through the deck. The captain made the decision — which the subsequent investigation would identify as the principal proximate cause of the death toll — to continue running upriver at full speed rather than ground the vessel on the nearest shore. His stated reason was that the nearest shore was the Manhattan oil-tank wharves, which would have ignited if the burning steamer ran into them. The actual nearest reasonable beaching ground (Astoria, on the Queens side of the East River) was not chosen.

Van Schaick continued upstream for approximately fifteen more minutes, fanning the flames against the steamer’s forward bulkhead.

Why the equipment failed

The Slocum was equipped with the standard 1904 inland-passenger-steamer fire and life-safety equipment.

The fire hoses were stowed in canvas wrappings on the foredeck. When opened on 15 June 1904 they were found to be rotted from age and lack of pressure-testing. The first hose burst at the coupling on the first attempt to pressurise it. The second hose burst within ten metres of its run-out length. Pressure water never reached the fire.

The life jackets had been manufactured in 1891 by the Kahnweiler firm of Camden, New Jersey, and stowed under the upper-deck seats since approximately 1896. By 1904 the cork fill had disintegrated into dust. Federal law required life jackets to be a minimum specified weight to qualify as flotation devices. The Kahnweiler manufacturer had met the legal weight requirement by packing iron filings into the canvas cases with the cork dust. The jackets weighed the legally-required amount but no longer floated. Several hundred passengers — mostly women and children — put on the legally-mandated life jackets and jumped into the East River. They sank.

The lifeboats were nailed to the upper deck and painted into the paintwork. They could not be released. None was launched.

The fire reached the boilers at approximately 10:15 a.m. The remaining passengers — those still on the Slocum — burned. The remainder of those who had entered the water — many of whom did not know how to swim — drowned. A small number, generally older women in heavy clothing, were entangled in the side-wheel paddle housing and crushed.

North Brother Island

Van Schaick finally grounded the Slocum on the shore of North Brother Island in the East River at approximately 10:20 a.m. — about twenty minutes after the fire had been detected, and several miles past the points where earlier grounding would have saved most of the passengers. The Slocum’s forward half was already largely consumed. The aft half, where most of the surviving passengers had crowded, was approximately 30 metres offshore in 6 metres of water.

The North Brother Island was occupied by the Riverside Hospital — a contagious-disease hospital that included the involuntary quarantine of “Typhoid Mary” Mallon. The hospital staff and patients rescued surviving passengers from the water for approximately the next two hours. Approximately 350 passengers were rescued alive.

The official final death toll, as confirmed by the New York City Coroner’s office in August 1904 after extensive identification of recovered bodies, was 1,021 dead.

Consequences

The Steamboat-Inspection Service investigation, completed July 1904, identified equipment failure (the rotted hoses, the iron-filings life jackets, the painted-shut lifeboats), routine inspection failure (the Slocum had passed inspection on 5 May 1904, six weeks before the fire), and Captain van Schaick’s grounding-decision error as the proximate causes.

Van Schaick was charged with criminal manslaughter and was convicted on 23 October 1906 — the only person convicted in the disaster. He was sentenced to ten years in federal prison at Sing Sing. He was paroled in 1911 after three and a half years and was pardoned by President William Howard Taft in December 1912. He died in 1927, aged 90.

The Knickerbocker Steamboat Company was not prosecuted. The president and treasurer were charged with manslaughter but acquitted. The company’s principal directors had transferred most of their personal assets out of the corporate structure before the trial; the eventual civil-suit settlements paid the families approximately $40 per dead passenger.

The Lutheran parish of St Mark’s lost approximately 800 communicant members in the disaster — over half its congregation. The Kleindeutschland neighbourhood demographically did not recover from the disaster. Most surviving German families moved out of the Lower East Side within the next decade — partly because of the disaster’s psychic association, partly because of the broader 1900s German-American demographic shift to Yorkville on the Upper East Side. The Lower East Side became, by the 1920s, predominantly Jewish and Italian.

The PS General Slocum disaster was the single deadliest event in New York City history — measured by lives lost in a single day — until the World Trade Center attacks of 11 September 2001. The 2001 attacks killed approximately 2,750 people; the Slocum killed approximately 1,021. The 97-year interval is the longest gap in any city’s recorded death-toll record for that specific kind of comparison.

A small memorial fountain in Tompkins Square Park, erected by the Kleindeutschland survivors in 1906, lists no names. The anonymity was the donors’ specific decision: too many of the dead had been recovered from the East River in unidentifiable condition to permit a complete name list.