German Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Mark
German Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Mark is a historic church and synagogue building at 323 East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The Renaissance Revival style church was built in 1847 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Matthew which first rented it to St. Mark's and subsequently sold it to them in 1857. By the end of the nineteenth century the congregation was in decline as congregants were moving elsewhere. Much of the church membership was killed in the  1904 "General Slocum" disaster, most of the victims being women and children, and the congregation never recovered. In 1940, the church was converted to the Community Synagogue Max D. Raiskin Center, an Orthodox Jewish congregation. Section::::"General Slocum" disaster. In 1904, The Ladies' Aid Society (Frauenhilfsverein) chartered the "General Slocum" steamboat for their summer outing on the East River. The boat caught fire and over 1000 parishioners perished in one of the worst disasters in the city's history. Thereafter Germans began moving uptown from the Lower East Side, primarily to Yorkville, and abandoned the church. The parish of St. Mark 's merged with the Zion Church in Yorkville in 1946 to become Zion St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church. Preservation. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, and is located within the East Village/Lower East Side Historic District, which was created in October 2012.