History -- Ship Ablaze: The General Slocum Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)It was a new century, and the little German community in new York's East Village was celebrating both the new age and its successful grip on the American dream with a picnic. More than 1300 boarded the pleasure steaner "GENERAL SLOCUM" in lower Manhattan and made their way slowly up the East River to the accompaniment of an oombah band; by the time they reached North Brother Island, more than a thousand -- mostly women and children -- had been drowned or burned to death. It would be decades before New Yorkers purged from their minds' eye the sight of the brightly-painted sidepaddle Slocum running north at top speed trailing flames and bodies, as pleasure craft and tugs desperately manoeuvered as close as possible to the inferno in an attempt to save a few passengers, or the sight of hundreds of corpses, dressed in Sunday crinolines, lining the shores of North Brother. Outraged New yorkers demanded justice, but only one head -- and almost certainly the wrong one -- ever rolled.
And New Yorkers did, finally, forget New York's greatest disaster prior to 9/11, and America's worst maritime (actually, freshwater) disaster next to The Sultana. While the Triangle Shirtwaist fire has been kept alive by the resonance of workers' rights, union organizing and employer callousness, the virtual extermination of an entire New york City immigrant community was eventually forgotten.
At least until Edward T. O'Donnell's excellent SHIP ABLAZE, published for the 100th anniversary of the Slocum disaster, and NY Harbor photographer Francis J. Duffy (THE NEW YORK HARBOR BOOK) organized a 100th anniversary cruise tracing the Slocum's path into history. And, happily, A&E used both O'Donnell and Duffy to tell this forgotten story, so that all of us could see a brilliantly reconstructed Slocum sail again up the East River, filled with beautifully-costumed picnickers obvlivious of the harrowing ordeal ahead, an ordeal only a handful would survive, plunging turn-of-the-century New York into mourning, and virtually destroying the City's German community.
Thanks to O'Donnell, Duffy and A&E, the Slocum disaster rises above the status of an unfortunate and forgotten local misadventure and regains the stature of a national tragedy that every New Yorker and every American should remember.
Steffan Aletti

Click Here to see more reviews about: History -- Ship Ablaze: The General Slocum

Click here for more information about History -- Ship Ablaze: The General Slocum