“Just reading history about the fire lacks the visceral punch that her sister’s shoes provides,” Valerie Paley, the society’s chief historian and vice president, said. “She had another sibling, Helen, who also died, and her body was never recovered. But we have earrings, which were located in the hull, that the family believed belonged to her.”

The only remaining monuments to the General Slocum disaster are a little fountain at Tompkins Square Park and a slightly more prominent memorial (emblazoned with both an English and a German account of the event) at Lutheran-All Faiths Cemetery in Queens, where many of the unidentified Slocum victims were buried.

“Some have speculated that the anti-German sentiment of the World War I era clamped down on public desire to commemorate a disaster that killed mostly immigrants from that country,” said Greg Young, who along with Tom Meyers produces the popular Bowery Boys podcast, which is devoted to New York history. “I do think a more modern memorial should be considered, not just as a remembrance of the German presence on the Lower East Side but because these were New Yorkers.”

The General Slocum’s sinking was the single largest loss of life locally until Sept. 11, 2001. Mrs. Wotherspoon, who was the youngest passenger saved and became the disaster’s last survivor, was once asked, toward the end of her life, why this grim chapter in Manhattan history was mostly forgotten.