I lived in Manhattan for a decade. And as I drank my Sunday morning coffee and read my New York Times in Carl Schurz Park, above 86th Street and East End Avenue, I was completely oblivious that the East River is not a river.
It is a tidal race, the southern arm of the sound that defines Long Island. And just to the north of my semi-private sanctuary, was the birthplace of the United States Army Corp of Engineers. Without their skill and brains (and the largest man made planned explosion of the 19th century) New York City would have remained a second class harbor… and a thousand men, women and children might have been spared a terrifying and painful death.
A few minutes after 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday 15 June, 1904 “The General Slocum” - a 235 foot long, 37 foot wide side paddle wheel steamship built for passenger excursions around New York - , left the East Third Street dock, carrying 1,300 German Lutheran immigrants (mostly women and children) to a picnic on Long Island.
The “Slocum’s” three decks were barely half full, and the children waved to the people on shore as 68 year old Captain William Van Schaick guided her from atop the pilot house up the East River at 16 knots toward the Hells Gate.
Every high tide that pours into the East River from New York Harbor in the south and Long Island Sound to the north, swirls between Manhattan the Bronx and Queens on Long Island where it slams into the delayed tide approaching from the opposite direction. For thousands of years, this titanic struggle occurred unseen by European eyes in a rock garden between Astoria Queens, on the Long Island shore, and Ward's Island in mid current,
A hundred years after the Royal Navy frigate HMS Hussar was driven onto the rocks near North Brother Island in 1780, fortunes and lives have been smashed on infamous outcrops bearing colorful and deadly names such as "Frying Pan Rock" and "Bald Headed Billy".
Eighteenth century New York City resident Washington Irving described the Hells Gate this way; “…as the tide rises it begins to fret; at half tide it roars with might and main, like a bull bellowing for more drink; but when the tide is full, it relapses into quiet, and for a time sleeps as soundly as an alderman after dinner.
"In fact, it may be compared to a quarrelsome toper, who is a peaceable fellow enough when he has no liquor at all, or when he has a skinful…plays the very devil.”
But the real danger was the combination of the current and the rocks which randomly thrust up from the bottom muck, like knives and daggers, Wrote Irving, "Being at the best of times a very violent and impetuous current, it takes these impediments in mighty dudgeon; boiling in whirlpools; brawling and fretting in ripples; raging and roaring in rapids and breakers; and, in short, indulging in all kinds of wrong-headed paroxysms....woe to any unlucky vessel that ventures within its clutches.”
And, because of the delay in the tide coming down Long Island Sound, there are four high tides a day at Hells Gate , each paired peak separated by two hours, keeping the Hells Gate in perpetual motion. That made the glacier scared bottom of the East River a deadly obstacle course.
“Three channels existed…the main ship channel to the north-west of the Heel Tap and Mill Rocks; the middle channel between Mill Rocks and Middle Reef; and the east channel between the Middle Reef and Astoria, from which Halletstts Reef projected; and vessels having traversed one…had to avoid Hogs Back and several smaller reefs…(and avoid) Heel Tap Rock…Rylanders Reef, Gridiron Rock of the Middle Reef .” (p.264. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Leveson Francis Yernok-Hartcourt 1888) By the late 1840’s a thousand ships a year were running aground in the Gate, ten percent of all the ships which entered.
In 1850 Monsieur Benjamin Maillefert was paid $15,000 to remove Pot Rock (above) - “rising like a rhinoceros horn from a depth of thirty feet to within eight feet of the surface...right next to a shipping lane” near the Queens shore. Maillefert lowered a canister of black powder on a rope and the resulting explosion managed to chip four feet off the horn.
Two hundred and eighty-three similar explosions later and Pot Rock was safely 18 feet below the surface. Similar attacks on the Frying Pan and Ways Reef dismantled the great whirlpool which had spun south of Mills Rock for five thousand years. But the start of the American Civil War in April of 1861 gave the merchants of New York more pressing and profitable places to invest their money. Hells Gate remained closed to all but the bravest and most foolish captains.
On that warm and lovely Wednesday morning, 15 June, 1904, the General Sherman (above), plowed her way northward, her 31 foot great paddle wheel pushing the river behind her . She glided past the tenements of the lower East Side, her single coal powered boiler trailing brown smoke behind. Few of the 3 1/2 million residents of New York bothered to take notice of the commonplace passage she made that day, as he had for the last 13 years.
At 14 knots she was soon approaching the Hell's Gate, at the southern tip of Ward's Island. Here the Harlem River branched off to the right, while the East Channel of the East River turned east, and headed for Long Island Sound.
In 1871 General John Newton of the United States Army Corps of Engineers took over the work of finally rendering Hells Gate a safe passage.
His first target was Hallet’s Point Reef, “, a three-hundred-foot rocky promontory that reached out from Astoria…” And this time General Newton intended to perform the entire task by a process he described as “subaqueous tunneling”. A cofferdam was constructed extending the Astoria shore, and digging with pick and axe and shovel from this extension the reef was under-mined with four miles of tunnels.
It took seven years. Then, 30,000 lbs of nitroglycerine – the most powerful explosive available at the time – was set off on 24 September, 1876. The explosion threw up a 123 foot plume of water. And the reef was gone.
In 1877, General Newton built a another sea wall around Flood Rock and another 70 foot deep shaft. was dug.
What followed was the now standard shafts and galleries reaching out below the East River bed. At the same time a similar process was underway at Mill Rock (above).
It took nine years to undermine these obstacles, but on 10 October, 1885 General Newton’s daughter, Mary, pressed an electrical key that simultaneously set off both sets of the charges. It was, “The greatest single explosion ever produced by man (intentionally)” - up to that time.
Nine acres of East River bottom were pulverized. Columns of water rose 150 feet into the air. In that instant the Hells Gate became a safe passage for commercial ships - even excursion boats for children's picnics.
Just before ten o'clock , on 15 June of 1904., a boy told deck hand John Coakley, that he had seen smoke in a forward stairwell. Coakley, who had worked on the General Slocum for all of 17 days, found the source of the smoke to be a storage room. He then made two crucial mistakes. He opened the door, which fed air to the smoldering fire. And when he ran for help, he left the door wide open behind him.
The fifteen crew members rushed to pull down a fire hose, but none of the hoses on board had been inspected since the Slocum had been built, 13 years before. At the first surge of pressure the fire hose split apart. The crewmen then ran for a second hose , but they had to search, since they had never had a fire drill. Meanwhile the fire was drawn through the open door and sucked up the chimney of the three-deck stairwell.
Captain Van Schaick (above) was informed of the fire seven minutes after crewman Coakley had discovered it.
Van Schaick had never lost a passenger and he now decided now to add steam and head for North Brother Island, three miles ahead. There was a hospital on the island, and a gentle shoreline where the passengers could safely wade ashore.
However, as he rang up for more power from the engine room, Van Schaick could not see he was fanning the hungry flames behind him, trapping the terrified passengers at the stern.
When they reached for life jackets (above), visible in racks all over the boat, passengers found them tied down with wires to prevent theft. Those who managed to break the wires and free the preservers found they crumbled in their hands. They had not been inspected for a decade. “The hard blocks of cork inside them were reduced to find dust with the buoyancy of dirt.
...Most people jumped (over board) without them, but some people actually put them on, (and) plunged over the side and went straight to the bottom.” Some of those who managed to stay afloat were mauled by the paddle wheel, still driving the General Slocum through the Hells Gate at 16 to 18 knots - full power.
A witness at 138th street told the “Brooklyn Eagle” the General Slocum appeared in a cloud of smoke and fire, its whistles screaming, trailed by tugs, launches and even rowboats, all trying to help. “The stern seemed black with people…some were climbing over the railings…the shrieks of the dying and panic stricken reached us in an awful chorus…One by one, it seemed to me, they dropped into the water. As the Slocum preceded, a blazing mass, I lost sight of her around the bend, at the head of North Brother Island”
Captain Van Schaick failed in his attempt to run the General Slocum aground on North Brother Island, instead grounding on a rock in eight to ten feet of water.
To people who did not know how to swim, and who were wearing layers of heavy Victorian wool clothing, anything over six feet of water was a near certain death sentence.
The fire still raged, the upper decks collapsing into the hull, as police and firemen fought to save those who could be saved. ,
But eventually the circle of boats which had followed as the Slocum ran upstream, got smaller and smaller, as the would be rescuers came to realize the cries for help from the water had gone still.
Only the crackle of flames and the lapping of bodies against the shore of North Brother Island could be heard. New York City would run out of coffins for the 1,021 dead, mostly women and children.
In the final insult to the 321 survivors, the Captain jumped to a tugboat as soon as his ship grounded. He did not even get wet.
Seven people were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury. Officers of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company were indicted but never charged. The company paid a small fine for falsifying inspection records. Shortly there after the owner sold off his ships and walked away very wealthy.
Trials for the inspectors who had failed at their jobs, all resulted in mistrials.
Only Captain Van Schaick was convicted of criminal negligence. Two years after the disaster - in 1906 - he was sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing prison. But he was paroled by President Howard Taft in December of 1911. Captain Van Schaick died in 1927, at the age of 91.
The burned out hulk of the General Slocum was converted into a coal barge and renamed the "Maryland". She sank in a squall south of Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1911.
In 1997, ninety years after the Slocum disaster, 104 year old survivor Catherine Connelly told a reporter, “If I close my eyes, I can still see the whole thing.”
“Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand causalities. And most heart rending scenes…Not a single life boat would float and the fire hose all burst…Graft, my dear sir. ..Where there’s money going there’s always someone to pick it up.” James Joyce, “Ulysses”.
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