The Great 1835 New York Fire: Wind, Wood, Ice, No Water and the United States Marines

“South Street is burned down...exchange place is bured down...Wall Street is burned down.”

-from the New York Courier and Enquirer December 17, 1835

        The temperature has dropped to a frigid negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit.  It is the middle of the night December 16, 1835.  Gale force winds begin whipping through the meadowlands of New Jersey.

The Hackensack and Passaic Rivers are frozen solid.  Only a few hours ago a bright full moon had illuminated the meandering waterways of ice and made them glow like reflective glass serpents as they wound their way through the marshlands.

Now, those same frozen rivers are glowing eerily pink in the night like something from a martian landscape, and the moonlight is obscured by dark and ominous clouds of smoke.

In New Jersey the sky is glowing red.  All of lower Manhattan has become one solid wall of flame.  The foreboding glowing red sky can be seen as far away as Philidelphia over eighty miles distant.

Just after sunset a fire had started in a wooden warehouse right near Wall Street.  As the winds picked up the fire spread quickly and soon engulfed the entire financial district.  Wooden warehouses, filled with combustible oils, cotton, furniture, ink and paper--all products that were the lifeblood of New York’s (and the world’s) booming mid 19th century economy--went up in flames within a matter of seconds.

New Yorker’s ran from their homes and into the middle of the street, panicked, half-clothed and seeking desperately to escape the onrushing inferno.  Amazingly, as the fire spread rapidly, covering more than seventeen city blocks and over thirteen square acres of real estate, only two citizens would die from smoke inhalation that night.

This is the second time in less than a century that New York has gone up in flames.  The first time was in 1776, when right after George Washington’s retreating Continental Army departed the city, Manhattan went up in flames as its British conquerors took over.  Many suspect that the fire of 1776 had been started by a bitter patriot who had decided to raze the city to the ground and leave nothing for the invaders from the mother country to exploit.

But the fire of 1835 is different.  No one really suspects a premeditated man made cause.  In fact, no one can pinpoint exactly how, or why, the Great Fire of New York of 1835, actually started.

The Great New York Fire of 1835 was simply the result of many unfortunate circumstances in the course of the city’s history coming together to create the perfect conditions for a fiery hell on earth to rage.

                                                        

 Just the previous year, in 1834, the Erie Canal had opened and linked New York City with the interior of the United States and Canada via water.  New York already had America’s busiest harbor, the import and export traffic of which doubled that of Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore combined by the 1830’s.  Add to this the great international trade already being generated by New York’s teeming harbor, and by 1835 the City is the financial and shipping capital of the burgeoning United States of America.

Manhattan is ever growing and expanding northwards.  Wooden buildings, both commercial and residential have already begun to spring up in present day Harlem and even as far north as the Bronx.  New York’s population has grown by almost 150,000 in the past ten years and is estimated to be almost half a million souls by the time of the Great Fire.

Half a million human beings living and working next to warehouses packed with materials ready to explode; living and working in buildings made almost exclusively of dried wood, buildings literally piled on top of one another, built end to end over meandering city streets that lead seemingly nowhere and are so narrow that two men can’t even walk past one another without touching shoulders.  Not to mention the fact that New York, like all the rest of the world’s urban areas, is a city lit only by fire either in the form of burning gas lamps, candles or hearths and it’s truly a miracle that tens of thousands weren’t incinerated in the blaze.

At the time, there really is no official New York City Fire Department.  Rather, in 1835 the FDNY operated on an entirely volunteer basis.  The only employees paid by the city of New York who are in any way connected with fire prevention are the watchmen.

The job of a 19th century watchmen is to sit atop a high wooden tower and look out across the city skyline for any signs such as wisps of smoke, sparks or possible suspicious activity that may be indicative of a potential fire.  The problem with watchmen when it came to fire prevention in New York City was two fold.  For one thing, the city didn’t invest enough funds in watchmen and consequently there were too few watchtowers to begin with and not even all of lower Manhattan was visible from watchtowers based upon their scarcity.  And secondly, the real problem with watchmen on the night of December 16, 1835, is that once signs of fire were spotted all the watchmen could do was ring bells, blow whistles and impotently yell “FIRE!” until the city’s pathetically small force of untrained volunteer firefighters arrived on the scene.

Nineteenth century fires were a constant source of peril and concern to all New Yorkers.  The worry over fire became so bad that it was very difficult for building and business owners to buy insurance in Manhattan for their companies and their real estate because due to the likelihood of a potential fire, many insurance brokers charged exorbitant fees based upon the risk.  Those insurance companies who did take the risk and insure building and business owners in Manhattan prior to the Great Fire of 1835 would live to regret their decision because as a direct result of the damage caused by the fire, twenty-five of New York’s then twenty-seven insurance companies would end up folding.

        Wind, freezing temperatures, late notice, untrained and inadequate fire response, combustible building materials, a tightly packed population and lack of adequate insurance were all factors that made the Great Fire of 1835 so devastating, but there was one other cause that may even have been far worse.  Lack of water.

In December of 1835 there were two  primary sources of water in Manhattan with which to fight fire, and neither one of them were available to firefighters during the Great Fire.

For small fires, those that took place in a single building and were contained to a small area, firefighters at the time relied on cisterns that were scattered throughout the city and would be filled by falling rainwater or melting snow.  However, the fall and winter of 1835 was a particularly bad one for drought and for annoying housefires and by the night of December 16, 1835, most of the water in the city’s cisterns had already been spent.

Typically, though, to respond to a fire of such a large magnitude firefighters at the time would not have relied upon cisterns, but rather they would have pumped water out of both the East and the Hudson Rivers to extinguish the flames.  The problem was that the night of December 16, 1835 is one of the coldest on record for New York City, and both river’s were frozen solid just like their Passaic and Hackensack counterparts in New Jersey.

At the time of the fire there were five horse drawn pump trucks available to the FDNY.  These trucks, utilizing pumps and hoses, operated in theory at least, much as a modern fire truck does, provided that there is an adequate source of water available to fight the blaze such as a hydrant or body of water.  But with both rivers frozen solid and with all the cisterns dry there simply was not enough water readily available.

As the fire continued to rage and engulf all of lower Manhattan including the Stock Exchange, the Mercantile Exchange building and even the post office, firefighters attempted to drill holes in the ice to get at the water below and start to get the pump trucks working.  But this drilling technique was simply too slow and laborious and at the time it appeared as if the entire city would simply cease to exist beneath a sheet of red hot flame.

A warehouse full of turpentine began to smolder and soon there was an explosion so loud it could be heard miles away throughout all of northern New Jersey.  Within seconds of the explosion blazing turpentine began to flood into New York harbor and make it seem like even the water itself had become molten lava

Luckily, a contingent of United States Marines was permanently stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Marines loaded barges with gunpowder and boarded lifeboats, canoes and whatever waterborne craft they could find to cross the East River and help the nearly overwhelmed FDNY fight the inferno.

When the Marines arrived, and saw how out of control the fire had become, they used their gunpowder to employ a then nearly revolutionary firefighting technique--the urban firebreak.  By this time the fire had destroyed upwards of 700 buildings, and incinerated seventeen city blocks, and the innovative United States Marines decided to contain the fire by blowing up buildings around its perimeter and creating a wall of debris which would no longer feed the flames with such ferocity.

For perhaps the first time in the history of United States urban firefighting a firebreak to contain a major conflagration was successfully employed by the United States Marine Corp and within hours the flames would die out.

  Large sections of New York City would burn again in the future.  There would be the great fire of 1845 which would start near midtown and spread throughout a large part of Gotham.  And more recently, in the 1970’s, there would be a wave of arson as deviant landlords would attempt to collect insurance money on their broken down slums and incinerate almost all of the south Bronx in the process.  Lastly, the famous New York City Blackout of 1978 would see rioters light hundreds of buildings on fire in a single night.  But never again, would anything match the sheer speed and ferocity of the Great New York Fire of 1835.

As a direct result of the Great Fire of 1835, New York City municipal authorities would improve and expand upon the city’s water supply, both for purposes of sanitation and drinking water as well as to improve the city’s firefighting capabilities.

In 1837 construction on the Croton Aqueduct, which fed water from rivers and reservoirs located just north of the city in Westchester County into Manhattan, would be completed.  The Croton Aqueduct would remain in operation as a source of drinking water and as the main pipeline for the city’s thousands of fire hydrants until 1942.

In addition to the construction of the aqueduct, city planners would begin to expand city streets, and in the wake of the damage caused by the fire as the city was rebuilt, architects and engineers ensured that all of Manhattan would be bisected by open thoroughfares such as Broadway and the modern Fifth Avenue that we know today, making it much more difficult for fires like that of 1835 to spread with such devastating rapidity.

Immediately after the Great Fire of 1835 New York became the first major American city to create a large and highly trained fire department by establishing the professional FDNY and using it to staff dozens of firehouses throughout the city from which brave firefighters could respond to an emergency in any location within a matter of minutes.

Despite all these improvements the legacy of the Great New York Fire remains with all of us who visit America’s greatest city to this very day.  The next time you visit Manhattan to take in a Broadway show, see a ballgame, eat at your favorite restaurant or have a drink take a look around and see if you can find a building anywhere south of Wall Street built before 1836.  And when you aren’t able to locate one just remember the Great Fire of New York in the year 1835 and all of the change and upheaval that it caused.