The firemen really had their hands full on Dec. 16, 1835, when a raging fire left the city’s business district in ruins. Read about the most destructive fire in New York City history.
It was a frigid winter night when a watchman making rounds in downtown Manhattan smelled smoke at the corner of Pearl and Exchange streets.
Breaking down the door of a warehouse, he and his fellow watchmen discovered a fire already raging out of control. Within 15 minutes, 50 buildings were in flames.
The temperature was 17 degrees below zero. The East River was frozen. It was impossible to get water to the blaze, as it froze in the hoses. Every cistern and well was frozen.
The firemen desperately stomped on the frozen hoses to try to clear them, but it didn’t do much good. The water backed up from the hoses and spewed out, freezing almost instantly on the street.
The heat was so intense that the iron shutters and copper roofs on many buildings melted and ran off in molten streams. If things weren’t bad enough, the cold winter wind kicked up to further fan the flames, blowing the fire from building to building.
By midnight, the entire business district was in flames, including the Stock Exchange, the merchants exchange, post office, two churches, several major banks, warehouses and dry-goods facilities. The fire was so great that the glow could be seen all the way in Philadelphia.
The fire which started in a five-story warehouse, lasted more than 15 hours, exhausting the firemen, many of whom were volunteers. Citizens pitched in to help. Desperate for water to extinguish the blaze, firefighters tried to get water from the frozen river, breaking through the ice to get at the water below. The fire was finally put out after firemen blew up buildings around the inferno to create a firewall.
When the smoke finally cleared, more than 700 buildings were destroyed, including the last of the old historic Dutch buildings. Damages were estimated at between $20 million and $40 million, about $200 million today – enough to build three Erie Canals.
Twenty-three of the city’s 26 insurance companies were forced into bankruptcy. Luckily, however, despite the size and ferocity of the blaze, only two people were killed – mainly because at that time, not many people lived downtown and the area’s workers had gone home for the evening. The world had not seen such a fire since Sept. 2, 1666, when another great fire destroyed most of London.
Amazingly, in a year’s time, every fire-ravaged block had been restored with buildings even more beautiful than before. But it was obvious in the wake of the Great Fire that changes needed to be made so that such a calamity would never happened again.
The Fire Department, which had been generally disorganized, was slowly restructured. There were changes made to the way in which fires were fought, building codes and fire-insurance practices.
The greatest thing that resulted from the fire was that New York’s antiquated water system was replaced with the biggest and most modern water system in the world – the Croton Water system. Millions of gallons of water would travel through 41 miles of stone tunnels from upstate New York to the outskirts of the city.
Water would never be in short supply again.
Standards: E1c, E2d, E3b, E3c, E3d, E4a, E4b, E5a; Social Studies Standard 1.
New York Post Activities
BESIDES frozen water hoses, what other challenges do you think the firefighters faced when trying to put out the Great Fire?
Write an essay on how you think the fire could have been stopped sooner than in 15 hours.
Use the Internet, encyclopedia or a history book to learn more details about
New York’s Great Fire of 1835 and the London Fire of 1666.