Mr. Blue Sky said

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_George_Prince_ferry_disaster



It was the worst ferry disaster in U.S. history, with 78 dead.. We lived in Destrehan at the time (i was a baby) and my parents lost a lot of friends that day... yet no one locally seems to know much about it, or that it happened at all.



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Strictly speaking, the disaster was not at all due to conditions in the Hell Gate. The General Slocum was an excursion ferry built in 1891 with a rated capacity of three thousand passengers. On June 15, 1904, the ferry was chartered by St. Mark's Lutheran Church in the East Village. Some 1,358 members of Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), the tightly knit German immigrant community then surrounding Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side, boarded the ferry around nine that morning at a pier on Third Street and the East River........

All told, 1,021 perished out of the original 1,358 who boarded the ship that morning

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