German immigration to the Lower East Side surged in the 1840s and never stopped. In the 1850s alone, 800,000 Germans passed through New York. They arrived with something unusual for immigrants of that era: education and marketable skills. More than half the city's bakers and cabinet makers were German or of German origin. Many worked in construction. Educated arrivals like Oswald Ottendorfer, owner-editor of the Staats-Zeitung -- New York's largest German-language newspaper -- wielded real political power, helping elect mayors and leading what became known as the German Democracy. Friedrich Sorge and Joseph Wedemeyer helped build the American trade union movement. By the start of the twentieth century, nearly 50,000 people called Little Germany home, spread across the 10th, 11th, 13th, and 17th Wards.

What set Kleindeutschland apart from other immigrant neighborhoods was how precisely its residents sorted themselves. Germans from the same home state clustered together, re-creating regional identities down to the ward level. Prussians, who by 1880 made up nearly a third of the city's German-born population, packed the Tenth Ward. Hessen-Nassau families preferred the Thirteenth Ward in the 1860s, then drifted north over the decades. Hanoverians formed their own enclave -- a 'Little Hanover' within Little Germany. The Bavarians, the largest single group by 1860, had one consistent trait in their settlement pattern: they lived wherever the Prussians were fewest. Old World rivalries, it seems, survived the Atlantic crossing intact.

June 15, 1904, was meant to be a celebration. St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church had chartered the General Slocum, a large paddlewheeler, for its seventeenth annual school-year-end picnic. Over 1,300 passengers boarded for a cruise up the East River to a picnic ground on Long Island. Most were women and children -- the mothers, daughters, and grandmothers of Kleindeutschland's most established families. Shortly after departure, fire broke out in a forward storage compartment. The lifeboats were rotted in their davits. The life preservers crumbled when passengers grabbed them. Captain William Van Schaick's response was disastrously inadequate. An estimated 1,021 passengers died by fire or drowning that afternoon, making it the deadliest single-event disaster in New York City history until September 11, 2001.

Only about one percent of Little Germany's population perished aboard the Slocum. But they were the social bedrock -- the church families, the community organizers, the mothers who held households together. Grief rippled through every block. Some bereaved parents, spouses, and friends took their own lives. Arguments erupted over the distribution of relief funds. Family quarrels split old friendships. When a jury convicted Captain Van Schaick only of criminal negligence -- not manslaughter -- and the judge sentenced him to ten years, many felt the final indignity had been delivered. The neighborhood's decline had already been underway for decades, as second-generation German-Americans moved to Brooklyn's Williamsburg or uptown to Yorkville. But the Slocum disaster broke something that could not be repaired.

In the wake of the disaster, much of the remaining German population abandoned the Lower East Side. The anti-German sentiment that arrived with World War I made return unthinkable. Into the spaces left behind came waves of Eastern European Jews and southern Italians, transforming Kleindeutschland into what the world would come to know as the Jewish Lower East Side. Today, the former St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church has been a synagogue since 1940. The Freie Bibliothek is now the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library, its name the only remaining link to the community that built it. Walking these streets today -- Second Avenue, Tompkins Square, the blocks around St. Mark's Place -- there is almost nothing visible of the German city that once thrived here. Little Germany did not fade. It was swept away.