For the latest news visit qchron.com 42 ND ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2020
QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 12, 2020 Page 10
C M ANN page 10 Y K 1904
TRIUMPH OVER TRAGEDY
Ship fire claimed 1,300 lives in 1904 General Slocum survivors relocated to Middle Village by Katherine Donlevy Associate Editor
efore the sinking of the Titanic on its way to the city or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the General Slocum disaster, though not as infamous, marked the greatest loss of life in New York City until Sept. 11, 2001. To this day, the June 15, 1904 disaster that claimed as many as 1,342 lives, remains the city’s greatest maritime disaster. The passenger steamboat had been chartered by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Little
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Germany district of Manhattan to take about 1,400 passengers up the East River and across the Long Island Sound to Locust Grove in Eaton’s Neck, LI, for a picnic. The group, made up of almost only women and children, made the trip each year for nearly two decades. Just 30 minutes after the ship began its Wednesday morning passage, a fire began in the Lamp Room. It only took an hour for the boat to burn and sink, stealing the victims’ lives rapidly. “There was just a number of worstcase scenarios,” Kara Schlichting, an assistant professor of history at Queens College, said on the conditions that led to the tragedy. Had the ship been properly equipped for emergencies, the loss of life would have been much less significant. First, the life preservers had rotted so severely that they had the consistency of wet cardboard, Schlichting said. The mothers who placed their children in the jackets and tossed them over the ship watched in horror as the kids were dragged straight below the surface. The women themselves, dressed in the customary garb of layered wool despite the summer heat, were also
dragged below the waves if they chose to jump overboard rather than take their chances with the flames. “There was no maintenance of life boats, canvas [fire] hoses were rotten; they split at the seam as soon as the water moved through them,” Schlichting said, adding that the crew had little emergency training and had possibly never practiced fire drills. To make matters worse, the tragedy occurred in the choppy Hell Gate waters off Astoria made dangerous by multiple converging tides and currents. “You couldn’t have had this happen in a worse place,” the professor said. The burned General Slocum sank into the shallow water at North Brother Island near the Bronx shore. There were only 321 survivors. “When you have a tragedy, sometimes good comes out of it,” said Bob Singleton, the executive director of the Greater Astoria Historical Society. “Every time we step on a boat or any public transportation, we are beneficiaries of this tragedy.” The disaster helped spur the push toward stronger public safety laws, enforcement by federal and state government and the holding of company owners accountable for maintaining property to regulation standards. Captain William Van Schaick was charged with criminal negligence and failing to maintain proper fire drills and fire extinguishers and sentenced to 10 years, though he only served three before he was pardoned by President William Howard Taft. The ship’s owners, the Knickerbocker Steamship Co., was slapped with a fine, though relatively small consider-
The General Slocum disaster of 1904 claimed approximately 1,300 lives, most of whom were women and children and all of whom were traveling to Long Island for a picnic. PHOTOS COURTESY GREATER ASTORIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ABOVE AND BELOW LEFT, BY KATHERINE DONLEVY; FILE PHOTO, RIGHT
ing there was evidence it had falsified inspection records. This General Slocum tragedy, combined with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and sinking of the Titanic, which killed 146 and up to 1,635, respectively, several years later, contributed to the strict guidelines that we have today, Schlitching said. Additionally, there were multiple accounts of heroism, including hospital workers on North Brother Island who jumped into the waters to try and save the drowning victims. Nearby boats pulled over to the burning ship without fear that their own craft would catch fire, but there was only so much the witnesses could do. “Another tragedy is how helpless people on shore were. There was nothing those people could do,” Schlitching said. Singleton, who knew a few survivors of the disaster toward the end of
their lifetimes, pointed to how the tragedy continued for years following the sinking of the General Slocum — almost every door in Little Germany displayed a black wreath signifying that they lost someone to the disaster. The residents couldn’t escape the trauma, so a great portion of the suffering families moved to Middle Village for a fresh start. In the early 20th century, Queens was relatively rural and allowed the mourners to switch to a slower pace of life. The German families, out of the tenement buildings and in homes w it h back ya rd s, rebu ilt t hei r community. “They were able to forget. That was the promise of Queens — it was a place people could restart their lives,” Singleton said. Survivors and the families of those who perished commemorated the loss with the Steamboat Fire
Mass Memorial in All Faiths Cemetery in their new home in Middle Village. The monument was erected in 1905 and, though the last survivor of the disaster died in 2004, mourners and the General Slocum Memorial Association gather on the anniversary every year — except in 2020 because of the pandemic. Other memorials have also been erected, including a fountain in Tompkins Square Park in the old Little Germany neighborhood, and a plaque in Astoria Park. “History teaches us many lessons about who we are as a people, how we got here,” Singleton said on why General Slocum is commemorated year after year. “History is not just celebrating a ritual of the past, it is to tap into the body of the past and to receive wisdom of the past so we don’t have to do the same over and Q over again.”
The General Slocum fire may have been started by a discarded cigarette or match and was fueled by the straw, oily rags and lamp oil in the Lamp Room. The disaster has been commemorated at the All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village each year since 1905, right.
