migrate northward into the Seventeenth Ward. The Bavarians (including Palatines from the Palatinate region of western Germany on the Rhine River, which was subject to the King of Bavaria), the largest group of German immigrants in the city by 1860, were distributed evenly in each German ward except the Prussian Tenth. Aside from the small group of Hanoverians, who had a strong sense of self-segregation forming their own "Little Hanover" in the Thirteenth Ward, the Bavarians displayed the strongest regional bias, mainly toward Prussians: at all times the most distinctive characteristic of their settlement pattern remained that they would be found wherever the Prussians were fewest. In 1845, Little Germany was already the largest German-American neighborhood in New York; by 1855, its German population had more than quadrupled, displacing the American-born workers who had first moved into the neighborhood's new housing, and at the beginning of the 20th century, it was home to almost 50,000 people. From a core in the riverside 11th Ward, it expanded to encompass most of the 10th, 13th, and 17th Wards, the same area that later became known as the Jewish Lower East Side. Tompkins Square Park, in what is now known as Alphabet City, was an important public space that the Germans called the Weisse Garten. There were beer gardens, sport clubs, libraries, choirs, shooting clubs, German theatres, German schools, German churches, and German synagogues. A large number of factories and small workshops operated in the neighborhood, initially in the interiors of blocks, reached by alleyways. There were major commercial streets including department stores. Stanley Nadel quotes a description of the neighborhood at its peak in the 1870s: General Slocum disaster On June 15, 1904, St Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church organized their 17th annual picnic to commemorate the end of the school year. A large paddlewheeler, the General Slocum, was chartered for a cruise on the East River to a picnic site on Long Island, and over 1,300 passengers, mostly women and children, participated in the event. Shortly after departing, a fire started in a storage compartment in the forward section. Although the ship was equipped with lifeboats and preservers, both were in disrepair. The inadequacy of the safety equipment, compounded with the poor leadership of Captain William Van Schaick, caused an estimated 1,021 passengers to die by fire or drowning. Although only one percent of Little Germany's population was killed by the disaster,