Southern Piers:

Southern Piers:. Stevens’ Battery, Ships and Immigrants. , Hoboken’s founding father, Colonel John Stevens, designed an iron-clad warship in 1813 that his surviving sons attempter to build starting in 1843 in a drydock just south of Second Street near Hudson Street. Known as the Stevens’ Battery, it was never completed. Note the location of the shoreline in the mid-19th century. River Street and the piers that would soon become home to the North German Lloyd Steamship Line did not exist. Landfill created space for streets, piers and buildings., North German Lloyd was one of the two major German passenger lines that made Hoboken its American home port from the 1870s until World War I. Its ships were among the largest, fastest and most stylish of the era. Besides first-class travel, they offered lower-class and steerage passage to many immigrants from Germany. These new arrivals were escaping social and political difficulties in their homeland, along with hard economic times. With an established German community, Hoboken was a natural home for these immigrants; in 1890, 41% of residents were of German heritage and “Little Bremen” was a name used by German-language writers for Hoboken., On June 30th, 1900, a fire that started aboard a North German Lloyd ship engulfed several vessels and destroyed the piers. With over 300 deaths, it remains one of America’s worst maritime disasters. Fireproof piers were built to replace them and lasted until the 1990s.