St Marcus Evangelical Lutheran Church, Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York

Original church building of the St. Marcus Evangelical Lutheran Church now a Jewish Synagogue

St. Mark’s was a German speaking Lutheran congregations in New York City. St. Marcus’ was located on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where German immigrants had founded it in 1846 to have a home for their faith.

The congregations grew at a rapid pace with the influx of mass immigration to the United States from Germany in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

In 1904 disaster struck St. Mark’s from which it never really would recover. The Ladies’ Aid Society (Frauenhilfsverein) had chartered a boat for its annual outing, the General Slocum. Almost all the women and children of the parishioners went aboard that steamship to sail up the East River for a wonderful summer day outing. Around hell’s gate, the boat caught fire and over 1000 parishioners perished. In 1946 then St. Marcus’ merged with Zion after most of the remaining congregation had left the Lower East Side and moved to Yorkville.

This is the ancestral church of the Herrmann-Dritschel family great grandparents of Carol Swinehart. Barbara/Babette Dritschel/Drutschel, (immigrated age 2 in 1850 from Altdorf bei Nurenberg, Bavaria), married George Herrmann, (immigrated ca 1859), in 1866. Most of their children were baptized in this church.

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