Slocum Memorial Fountain

The Slocum Memorial Fountain stands as a quiet witness to the single deadliest day in New York City history before September eleventh, two thousand one. Dedicated in nineteen hundred and six, this nine foot tall pink Tennessee marble monument commemorates the more than one thousand lives lost when the excursion steamer General Slocum caught fire on the East River. The ship had been chartered by the Saint Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church for their annual summer picnic, carrying primarily women and children from the local German immigrant community then known as Little Germany. The sculptor Bruno Louis Zimm designed the memorial with a low relief depicting two children looking out toward the sea, accompanied by a poignant stanza from a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem. For many years, this fountain has served as a place of annual remembrance for a tragedy that fundamentally altered the demographic and social landscape of the surrounding neighborhood.