Early in the morning of December 17, 1835, a group of volunteer New York City firefighters burst down the doors of several Wall Street buildings, placing barrels of potent gunpowder inside their walls, and then standing aside as they detonated the charges, laying the structures to waste. They were not rogues, and there was no malicious motive behind their actions. They were fighting a desperate battle against the worst fire New York City has ever seen.
It began in the late evening of December 16th, when a night watchman pried oped the door of a Pearl Street warehouse after smelling smoke and found the building full of flame. He sounded the alarm and called for the volunteer firefighters, but within 15 minutes fifty buildings had ignited. The rapid spread of flame was facilitated by narrow streets and almost entirely wooden structures that burned like dried out woodpiles. There were no safety codes or fire countermeasures built into place. The only saving grace was that in this almost exclusively commercial part of town the buildings were empty by nightfall and there was no one around be caught in the conflagration.
New York’s firefighters were exclusively volunteer based at this point in history, and were also very busy. Many of the men pulled from their beds to respond to the call were still recovering from fighting fires the night before. When they arrived to the site of the blaze it was readily apparent that this was no ordinary fire; it burned so hot and bright that the orange glow was visible as far away as Poughkeepsie and Philadelphia. While rival groups of volunteer firefighters would often bicker and even brawl over access to hydrants and water sources, it became clear as soon as they arrived that the question over water was moot: everything was frozen. The temperature dropped to negative seventeen degrees that night, forcing the firefighters to go down to the waterfront with their axes and hack through the ice of the east river to find liquid water. Even after getting pumping water out of the icy river, their hoses soon became stiff with ice before getting anywhere near the fire. It was largely hopeless.
With little hope of extinguishing the existing flames, the plan turned to stopping the fire from spreading to the rest of the city. The accepted technique at the time was to use gunpowder to blow up buildings in the path of the fire to create a gap too far for it to spread, much like the controlled burns still employed by firefighters today when battling wildfires. After chopping through the ice of the river to get their boat to the powder storage house in Red Hook, the firemen began blowing buildings along Wall Street to stem the spread north, while others destroyed buildings to the south and west of the still growing blaze. These proved successful and the fire, still burning with impunity, was left to burn itself out in this cordoned off section of mass destruction.
Ultimately 674 buildings were completely burned to the ground, and the total damage was estimated at up to $26 million, which Burns and Wallace quantify in Gotham by reminding us that $26 million was three times what it had cost to build the entire Erie Canal. New York simply wasn’t ready for destruction on this scale, an issue exemplified by the fact that twenty-three of twenty-six fire insurance companies in the city quickly declared bankruptcy. Regardless, New York City, as it always does, preserved and rebuilt stronger than before. Unlike the fire that had torn through downtown in 1776 where the burnt-out buildings were left to decay under British rule for nearly a decade, within a year the affected area of the 1835 fire was almost entirely rebuilt and back in business. The cause of the fire in that Pearl Street warehouse was concluded to have been a damaged gas line that had been ignited by some hot coals.