Filth, Fever, Water, Fire Garbage, cholera, Croton, and the Great Blaze.

well or ill they were made, the city’s privies were not prepared for the torrent of shit that now

descended on them, courtesy of a proliferating population. One (admittedly notorious) building

between Christopher and Grove housed forty-one families, all of whom shared one indescribably

disgusting privy, but the routine state of affairs was bad enough. When porous vaults were situated

higher than adjoining basements, their contents oozed downward into the living quarters of invariably

poorer neighbors. And when backed-up privies overflowed, which was often, or when storms

produced local flooding, human effluvia was swept into the streets, where it mingled with the rest of

the awful offal.

Privies were emptied periodically by “necessary tubmen”—one of the few jobs reserved

exclusively for blacks. Hired by the city, they were mandated to carry their loads in closed carts, in

dead of night or early morn, though this hardly mitigated their impact. In stifling summer months New

Yorkers slept with their windows open, and the stench from passing “night carts” was powerful

enough to wake the most somnolent. Also, to brace themselves for their revolting labors, some tubmen

fortified themselves with strong liquor, and their consequently raucous behavior generated additional

complaints, particularly in working-class neighborhoods.

Their routes run, the tubmen either laid their burdens down in landfill areas, dumped them directly

into the rivers (where they quickly coated the docks with slime), or delivered them to fertilizer

dealers who mixed them with sawdust and spent charcoal, producing a light manure they sold to

farmers. The one thing tubmen were not allowed to do with human waste was put it in the sewers.

Sewers were for water, not garbage of any description, and had been since drains were first built

in Manhattan in 1676. The first sewers had been open trenches for carrying off storm water from lowlying areas and preventing hazardous accumulations. By 1800 such trenches were common; made of

stone, brick, cement, or planks, they ran down the center or along the sides of streets. They were built

wide enough to permit access for cleaning, but the breadth made them slow running, stagnant, and

foul; to avoid decomposition by the sun, some were dug six feet deep, or below low-water mark. The

covered-over sewer under Canal Street, in the absence of air traps, continued to reek on warm days,

and the resulting decline in property values was long remembered.

In 1819 the Common Council had explicitly prohibited the use of sewers to carry off fecal matter.

It further required installation of grates at the junction of common sewers with household drains,

which allowed flood water in and kept solid wastes out. Dr. Hosack argued against this, proposing

instead adoption of water closets connected to sewers that would then convey “every species of filth”

to the rivers. He admitted, however, that the requisite flushing process would depend on New York’s

obtaining a far more abundant source of water than currently available.

The city’s water was not only scarce, but brackish, and it was fast becoming deadly. In 1829

researchers from the Lyceum of Natural History estimated that in every twenty-four hours New

Yorkers deposited over one hundred tons of excrement into the alluvium, from whence, accompanied

by other soluble waste, it percolated down to the water table. In the 1830s, due to the increase in

privies and to seepage from old graveyards, downtown wells were bringing up a tainted brew.

With pure water now a scarce commodity, it became allocated according to marketplace rules, by

ability to pay. The poor continued to use city wells, including the ancient “tea water pump.” Artisans

bought water, at a penny a gallon, from enterprising carters who carried hogsheads of “pure” country

springwater around the city; it too was often polluted. Even the well-to-do had problems, if they

relied on Aaron Burr’s old gambit, the Manhattan Company. The firm expanded its skimpy service at



a sludge-like pace, just enough to keep its banking privileges from being revoked. As the city moved

north, the Manhattan’s waterworks grew more remote from more people (the company didn’t operate

above Grand Street). By the end of the War of 1812, its scant twenty-three miles of wooden pipes

delivered perfunctory service to its select (and increasingly furious) clientele. Municipal authorities,

albeit reluctant to take on one of the city’s leading bondholders, came around slowly to the notion that

water was a public good, which should be publicly produced.

In 1821 Mayor Allen again proposed diverting the Bronx River into a municipal reservoir. In 1825

the state chartered a private company to bring water down from Westchester, but nothing much was

done until 1829, when the city built its own reservoir. A huge cast-iron tank—forty-three feet in

diameter, twenty feet high, with a capacity of 305,422 gallons—was set atop an octagonal stone

tower twenty-seven feet high, at the corner of the Bowery and 13th Street. Water was carried from

here south to the city by iron pipes, one running down Broadway to Canal, the other down the Bowery

to Catherine.

Farther than this the city would not go. For the affluent and powerful, the absence of abundant fresh

water remained an annoyance, not a crisis. But in the slums, the consequences of pollution, squalor,

and crowding were about to become lethal.

CHOLERA



In 1832 the cholera roared into town. New Yorkers had seen it coming. They had read in their papers

of its devastating march across Asia and the trade routes to Europe, reaching Poland, then France,

then England. City authorities knew the plague might well ride the sea lanes to the Hudson, but did

next to nothing with this foreknowledge.

New York’s old Board of Health certainly had authority to act. Yet it had been lulled into

quiescence in the ten years since the yellow fever epidemic of 1822. Its approach to disease

prevention, moreover, now concentrated almost exclusively on quarantining ships from dangerous

southern waters. Even there, it was under constant pressure not to render too hasty a diagnosis that

would cut off the flow of trade and profit. The board, one critic noted caustically, was “more afraid

of the merchants than of lying.”

As spring turned to summer, the corporation’s inactivity spurred men of medicine to demand

action. The Medical Society, which represented two-thirds of the city’s licensed physicians, urged

immediate cleaning of streets, yards, and vacant lots, disinfection of privies and cesspools with

quicklime, and establishment of a network of emergency hospitals. The city administration responded

with an apathy partly rooted in the conviction—widely shared, but advanced most ardently by

evangelical clergymen—that the plague, should it come, would pass over the virtuous parts of town

and descend, like God’s wrath, on its sin-infested quarters. Ministers told the pious that the path of

righteousness was the road to health. Temperance activists plastered Manhattan’s walls with notices

like QUIT DRAM DRINKING IF YOU WOULD NOT HAVE THE CHOLERA.(There was nothing like the

possibility of suffering and death for bringing sinners to their knees, wrote Lewis Tappan, with

something approaching glee.)

Physicians’ belief in “predisposing causes” also suggested the likeliest victims would be those

who, through indulgence in vice, intemperance, and filthy living habits, had weakened and

predisposed themselves to the disease. Science and religion thus sailed on parallel courses, with

their essential interconnections drawn out most clearly by Sylvester Graham, who lectured that



liquor, impure foods, and sexual dissipation undermined the body’s ability to resist the cholera. Bon

vivants ridiculed the Grahamites and advised citizens to fortify themselves with a hearty diet of meat,

spices, and brandy.

On June 15 the Albany steamboat brought word that the cholera had forded the Atlantic, wreaking

havoc in Quebec and Montreal. By June 18 it was reported at Ogdensburg. Mayor Walter Bowne

proclaimed a severe quarantine. No ship was to approach closer than three hundred yards to the city,

no land-based vehicle to come within a mile and a half. The Courier and Enquirer printed a cholera

extra of ten thousand copies. Apothecaries posted handbills advertising opium, camphor, and

laudanum. On June 20 a large group of clergy and prominent laymen met at the American Bible

Society and called for a day of fasting and prayer. They were seconded by the Common Council, but

workingmen’s advocate and freethinking editor George Henry Evans urged his readers to ignore the

recommendation as an “insidious and dangerous encroachment” on the separation of church and state.

Late Monday night, June 26, an Irish immigrant named Fitzgerald came home violently ill; he

recovered, only to have two of his children die after being struck by the identical agonizing stomach

cramps. The city fathers pressured the Board of Health into declaring them the victims of nothing

worse than diarrhea, a common summer complaint. But many physicians had seen and diagnosed

Asiatic cholera, and beneath the blanket of official silence, word spread fast.

Methodists began prayer meetings each morning. June 29, the day of fasting and humiliation, was

observed in scores of churches. The Medical Society, fed up with the dilatory Board of Health, stated

publicly on July 2 that cholera had struck nine people and that only one had survived. John Pintard

attacked this “impertinent interference” with the constituted authorities and asked if the doctors knew

the disaster their announcement would wreak on the city’s business.

On July 3 Leggett reported in the Evening Post that a great exodus had begun. For all the certainty

about their moral and physiological invulnerability, the city’s comfortable classes weren’t about to

stake their lives on it. The roads, Leggett noted, were lined with “well-filled stage coaches, livery

coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic struck, fleeing from the city, as we may suppose

the inhabitants of Pompeii or Reggio fled from those devoted places, when the red lava showered

down upon their houses.” Oceans of pedestrians trudged outward with packs on backs. Steamboats

bore refugees up the Hudson, among them Sam Ruggles and his family—he would correspond with

his Gramercy Park contractor from Newburgh—generating substantial profits for Commodore

Vanderbilt. Every farmhouse and country home within a thirty-mile radius was soon filled with

lodgers. By the end of the first week in July, almost all who could afford to flee had fled; by the

Post’s estimate of August 6, that figure eventually reached 100,000, roughly half the population.

Of the other half, 3,513 died, most of them horribly, the lucky ones swiftly. The young editor Henry

Dana Ward wrote his parents that some “are taken like lightning from the midst of their families and

daily work.” One paper reported smugly that a prostitute who had been adorning herself before her

glass at one was in a hearse by half past three.

Cartloads of coffins rumbled through the streets but couldn’t keep up with demand. One day Finney

noticed five hearses drawn up at five different houses, all at the same time, all within sight of his

door. In other neighborhoods, dead bodies lay unburied in the gutters. At the potters’ field, putrefying

corpses lay in shallow pits, the prey of rats.

As the city reeled, some sought to calm hysteria among the better-off still in town or camped

nearby, by noting that, as predicted, the plague was mainly scything the poor. John Pintard, observing



that the plague was “almost exclusively confined to the lower classes of intemperate dissolute &

filthy people huddled together like swine in their polluted habitations,” drew the terrible conclusion

that the sooner this “scum of the city” was dispatched, the sooner the fever, deprived of fodder,

would pass. Most New Yorkers who stayed in town, however, sprang into action in an effort to

succor or rescue plague victims, sinners or no. The Board of Health assumed governmental functions.

Streets, lots, cellars, and docks were cleaned of a decade’s accumulation of filth and strewn with

lime. The clothes and bedding of the sick were taken out and burned, the fumes filling the air.

With thousands of wage-earners thrown out of work by the abrupt cessation of the city’s business,

private citizens and churches established a Committee of the Benevolent. A July 16 meeting at the

Merchants’ Exchange collected about seventeen hundred dollars for poor relief; thousands more

dollars flowed from prominent merchants. The committee divided into fifteen subcommittees, one for

each ward. These groups paid local residents for “cleansing and purifying their own dwellings,”

established soup kitchens, and distributed food and clothing. This was hands-on charity. Gentlemen

searched out “the abode of poverty, filth, and disease” and administered “personally to the wants of

the wretched inmates” while “not omitting to warn the wicked of their evil ways, and point them to

the Great Physician of the Soul.”



As reported in this daily tally of its victims, the cholera epidemic raged through the

streets of the Five Points and other crowded downtown districts with particular

severity. (© Museum of the City of New York)

For some, the poor swam into focus for the first time. At the height of the epidemic Mrs. P.

Roosevelt noted that while ordinarily “no one notices the poor” who are “frequently are to be found

lying in the streets,” now they were being “picked up and taken to the hospitals.” “Only on occasions

such as this,” she reflected, “is the true extent of the misery of the City known.”

Despite earnest solicitations by the Board of Health, the trustees of the privately run New York

Hospital (who included Philip Hone and James DePeyster) flatly refused to accept cholera patients.

The brunt of the onslaught therefore fell on Bellevue, the public institution. By July 7 it had already

admitted 555, of whom 334 would die by August 8. Soon the place was swamped with the quick and

dead alike. Patients lay on the floors crying for water. There were often forty bodies at once in the

deadhouse, as the morgue was known. Before it was over, Bellevue would admit two thousand

people, over a sixth of all victims, and tally six hundred deaths.

To supplement its work, the Board of Health established five cholera hospitals around the city—in

the Hall of Records, a school, an old bank, an abandoned workshed, and a workshop at Corlear’s

Hook (the arrival of the latter precipitating a mass exodus of workers from adjoining shipyards).

Most poor people forcibly blocked efforts to remove their sick to these hospitals, regarding them as

charnel houses run by incompetents. Doctors and city officials who insisted were attacked and

brutally beaten.

Following precedents from earlier battles against yellow fever, the authorities set out to disperse

the deadly concentrations in the slums. A Committee to Provide Suitable Accommodations for the

Destitute Poor evacuated tenants, over the protests of anguished landlords. It moved them to buildings

and shanties around town (including one at 10th Street and Avenue C for “colored people in health”),

which they leased from other landlords, often at extortionate rents. It then arranged with the

commissioners of the almshouse to supply food, medicines, and clothing. The Court of General

Sessions discharged all prisoners convicted of misdemeanors and removed felons from the

penitentiary and Bridewell to temporary shelter at Blackwell’s Island.

Many churches closed down, especially the wealthier ones whose flocks had fled (St. George’s

shut for almost a month), but many clergy and religious stayed and did heroic work. The Catholic

Church won highest praise, with the Sisters of Charity and Father Várela singled out. (It was said that

Varela “lived in the hospitals.”) The Episcopal Mission Society expanded its outdoor relief efforts.

Evangelist Finney stayed at his post and caught the disease; he survived but was incapacitated for

months.

By the third week in July, with the epidemic at its height, great swathes of the city were deathly

silent, their streets deserted. Then it ended. Moving on almost as rapidly as it had blown in, the

cholera continued its journey along the trade routes, through the Erie Canal towns of western New

York, down the Ohio Canal to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, tracing the pathways of the market

economy with a finger of death.

In August the number of new cases began a steady decline. By the second half of the month,

refugees began to trickle back. On August 29 medical authorities pronounced the city safe. Pintard

was thrilled at the commercial resurrection. All was “life & bustle,” he rejoiced, with stores all



open, sidewalks lined with bales and boxes, streets crowded with carts, and “clerks busy in making

out Bills.” Beneath his notice, hundreds of beggars, vast numbers of them newly orphaned children,

plied the streets. Benevolent ladies started up a Brooklyn Orphan Asylum to deal with the youthful

survivors.

Stocktaking in the aftermath generally followed the lines of prior opinion. The Rev. Gardiner

Spring saw in the pestilence “the hand of God,” with His sanitary and salutary purpose apparently

having been “to drain off the filth and scum which contaminate and defile human society.”

Sabbatarians declared the disease “owing to vices which a proper regard to the Sabbath would check

more effectually than anything else.” Others blamed drink and slovenliness, including the governor of

New York, who opined that “an infinitely wise and just God has seen fit to employ pestilence as one

means of scourging the human race for their sins, and it seems to be an appropriate one for the sins of

uncleanliness and intemperance.”

The immigrant poor, who had fared worst, came in for the greatest opprobrium. The Board of

Health reported that “the low Irish suffered the most, being exceedingly dirty in their habits, much

addicted to intemperance and crowded together into the worst portions of the city.” They were poor

—due, of course, to their own idleness and fondness for drink—and poverty was the “natural parent

of disease.” Philip Hone brought a more succinctly brutal indictment: “They have brought the cholera

this year, and they will always bring wretchedness and want.”

Radicals insisted cholera was the result not of divine intervention but of human injustice. “It may

be heretical,” said George Henry Evans, “but we firmly believe that the cholera so far from being a

scourge of the Almighty is a scourge which mankind have brought upon themselves by their own bad

arrangements which produce poverty among many, while abundance is in existence for all.” Certainly

there was a correlation between poverty and mortality. But poverty was not a moral failing, Evans

wrote that August in the Workingman’s Advocate, it was “occasioned by unjust remuneration of

labor.” He urged New Yorkers to impose a graduated income tax that would secure funds from the

wealthy to make recurrence of the disease impossible. Other radicals called on the city to create a

park at Corlear’s Hook for working people, akin to facilities it was helping develop at Washington,

Gramercy, and Union Squares; this was vetoed as too costly and unlikely to generate significant new

tax revenues.

WATER



On one thing, there was general agreement: New York City needed fresh, clean water. Even those

who saw divine intervention at work didn’t contest physicians and sanitarians like William

MacNeven and John Griscom who pointed to the polluted drinking supply and the poisonous vapors

rising from the streets as major contributors to the plague.

In October 1832 the Common Council appropriated a thousand dollars for an inquiry into how to

fetch water to New York. A December report concluded that the Croton River in upper Westchester

County was the best source for an “inexhaustible” supply. In 1833, at the Common Council’s behest,

the legislature authorized creation of the New York State Water Commission, headed by former

mayor Stephen Allen, to supervise the city’s ongoing investigations. Surveyors declared the Croton

feasible, but the cost of building an aqueduct was pegged at five million dollars, an alarming estimate

that abruptly halted proceedings.

Opposition to the enormous expense might have postponed or even precluded the project, but for



the existence of another proaqueduct lobby. This coalition of landowners, speculative developers,

banks and insurance companies feared a different urban scourge—fire. Fire threatened to undermine

the real estate boom of which they were primary beneficiaries. Fires had been decimating rich areas,

not just poor ones, and with increasing frequency in the thirties. The year 1834 had been a terrible

one for property owners in the dry-goods district, the worst to date, and fire insurance companies had

been hit with claims approaching a million dollars. Afflicted businessmen joined the campaign for

new municipal initiatives, arguing that public costs were justified by private savings.

New York’s fire prevention efforts to date had concentrated on extending the “fire limits,” the part

of the city where special building codes regulated the material and design of private and commercial

structures. In 1812 the fire limits covered Manhattan south of Chambers Street. In 1815 they were

extended to a line crossing the island just above Washington Square. In 1833 they jumped north to

Second Street, and the following year, to 14th Street.

The city also abandoned reliance on church sextons to sound the alarm in case of fire, shifting to

purpose-built bell towers, with the number of clangs indicating in which of five fire districts a blaze

had been reported. Because these wooden stanchions too often fell prey to flames themselves, in

April 1835 officials placed a twenty-four hour sentinel in the cupola of City Hall to clang a large,

newly installed fire bell and hang a light in the direction of any perceived blaze.

To enhance the water-for-fire supply the Common Council had built a stopgap network of some

forty cisterns, usually beside a church, to catch rainwater (at times convicts were set to filling them).

In the event of a conflagration, fire engines were dragged to the nearest cistern, or if it was dry (as

was often the case, given low levels of rainfall), firemen would link their machines in a chain to the

nearest river. Neither method, however, could generate enough pressure to reach the upper levels of

newer, taller buildings. The 13th Street Reservoir, once connected to hydrants, proved capable of

lofting water to the roofs of most three-story houses, even without engines. The number of hydrants

grew rapidly, accompanied by street boxes containing coiled hemp hoses, and some predicted that

eventually there would be a hydrant on every block, making engines obsolete. However, one big tank

could not handle simultaneous blazes nor drive water to the tops of the four-to-five-story warehouses

going up downtown.

Sam Ruggles was deeply concerned—doubly so because he, like many large property owners,

including Mayor Cornelius Lawrence, held substantial shares in fire insurance companies. Insurance

company directors, moreover, were heavily represented on the Common Council and on the New

York State Water Commission, and together with the landed interests they formed a formidable lobby.

Additional support came from the manufacturing and service sectors. Industrialists needed water. The

New-York Gas-Light Company’s well was drying up. Chemical works, sugar houses, brewhouses,

distilleries, tanners, dyers, and soap makers: all faced dwindling liquid resources. Many businesses

also relied on steam engines—there were sixty of them around town in 1834—and taverns, hotels,

livery stables, and cake shops were all increasingly parched.

The water lobby was spurred on by another outbreak of cholera in 1834, which drove the number

of reported deaths up 50 percent over that of 1833, in sharp and sorry contrast to Philadelphia’s

success in curtailing the disease, widely credited to a vigorous street-washing campaign. The Sun

pronounced acquisition of an aqueduct to be a matter of “our city’s honor and our city’s pride.” The

penny presses’ blanket rivals, including the New York Commercial Advertiser, joined them in calling

for Croton water.



The conjoint pressure burst through remaining opposition, now chiefly from the Manhattan

Company and from uptown property owners who feared weakened demand for their real estate if

water came to the lower wards. In February 1835 the Common Council, citing both health and safety

crises, finally wrested the water supply from Burr’s progeny. The aldermen authorized a

reinvestigation of the Croton project and its submission to a popular referendum. In preparation for

the April 1835 vote, Ruggles and his colleagues paid the cost of printing pro-Croton tickets and of

hiring poll watchers. When the results were in, 17,330 backed the idea, 5,963 opposed it. Support

was highest in the elite First Ward, resistance strongest in the poorer districts, where many believed

they would be priced out of access. By July 1835 preconstruction surveys were underway.

New York had taken decisive steps toward revolutionizing its water supply. But action came too

late to prevent or contain the greatest fire in the city’s entire history, one of the most destructive

anywhere since London had been ravaged 169 years earlier.

FIRE



On the frigid evening of December 16, 1835, high winds pummeled downtown Manhattan. The

temperature kept plunging; before the night was over, it would bottom out at seventeen degrees below

zero. Just before nine P.M., as Watchman Hayes passed the corner of Exchange and Pearl streets, he

smelled smoke and summoned other watchmen. They quickly discovered the source in a five-story

warehouse, (Subsequent investigation “incontrovertibly established” that stove coals had ignited gas

escaping from a broken line.) Forcing open the door, they found the interior all aflame. They watched

helplessly as the inferno blew through the roof and jumped across the narrow and crooked streets,

whipped by the wind. Within fifteen minutes, fully fifty of the area’s tightly packed buildings were

ablaze.

The watchmen spread the alarm. The new City Hall sentinel clanged his bell. The jail next door

took up the pealing. Church belfries chimed in.

The firemen who now crawled out of their beds, exhausted from fighting two bad fires the night

before, were members of a shorthanded and demoralized department. The cholera epidemics had

taken a heavy toll on their ranks, which in any event had not kept pace with the growth of population.

The city had more than doubled in size since 1823, but the number of volunteers in 1835 stood at

fifteen hundred, up only 285 over the same period. Chief Engineer James Gulick, the six-foot-two

idol of the department, had cut down on slugfests between companies for control of hydrants, but

feuds still festered. Some of the firemen’s troubles were of their own making. The manly volunteers

stubbornly insisted on dragging their hand-operated engines to the scene, rather than permitting horses

to be used, and had no tolerance whatever for the new steam fire engines London had deployed since

1829.

Even had they been in peak condition, the firemen faced an impossible task. By midnight the

freezing winds had lashed the fire to an awesome and unmanageable ferocity; many thought the last

days of Pompeii the only fitting comparison. The sky was lit so brightly the glow could be seen in

Poughkeepsie, New Haven, and Philadelphia, where firemen turned out thinking their suburbs were

aflame. Help came from near and far. Brooklyn sent company after company by ferry. A locomotive

was rushed from Jersey City to Newark and returned with a train of flatcars loaded with fire engines.

One company came all the way from Philadelphia.

As the flames roared down to Water Street—jumping “like flashes of lightning,” Philip Hone



recalled later—arriving volunteers discovered that all the wells, cisterns, and hydrants were frozen

solid. Gulick sent a dozen engines to the East River. It was frozen too. Hook-and-ladder men took

their axes, ran to the ends of the piers, chopped holes in the ice, dragged an engine over, rigged up a

series of machines along Coenties Slip and up Water Street—only to discover that water froze in the

hose. By jumping up and down on the lines to break the ice clots and pouring alcohol into the engine

pumps, they worked up some feeble streams, only to have the wind hammer the water back in their

faces. Some, reduced to “the apathy of despair,” stood about helplessly, pouring brandy into their

boots to keep their feet from freezing. Others turned to salvage operations, dragging tons of silks,

satins, laces, and shawls out of warehouses. One phalanx piled a thirty-foot-high mountain of goods in

the center of Hanover Square, only to watch it vanish in flames that vaulted out from the warehouse of

Peter Remsen and Company. Later, there were bitter complaints about the predatory behavior of

cartmen who charged exorbitant rates for moving possessions away from flames and refused to serve

any but the wealthy.



View of the Great Fire in New York, December 16 & 17, 1835, aquatint by Nicolino

Calyo, 1836. All that remained of the Merchant’s Exchange was the burned-out shell on

the left. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

The fire headed north, seizing the marble and supposedly fireproof Merchants’ Exchange. Heroic

rescuers saved the trading records charting the speculative movements underway at the New York

Stock & Exchange Board. But efforts to salvage the statue of Alexander Hamilton failed, and the



would-be recovery men just escaped being buried in the collapse of the great sixty-foot cupola.

Around four A.M. the Tontine Coffee House went up. Foreman Mills, of Eagle Engine No. 13,

realized that if the flames crossed Wall Street the upper half of the city would go. Two buildings

were blown up to block the fire’s passage by depriving it of fuel. The gambit worked and, with

Mayor Lawrence’s permission, was deployed more vigorously. Lawrence dispatched Charles King,

editor of the New York American, to the Navy Yard for officers and sailors to do the demolitions and

for the necessary gunpowder, but these supplies proved inadequate. While Mayor Lawrence and

Colonel Hamilton raced from grocery to grocery scraping together portions of powder, and others

ransacked the arsenal tearing open cartridges, King and a boatload of marines fought their way

through the ice-obstructed river to the Red Hook Point powder house and ferried back enough twentyfive pound kegs to prevent the inferno from crossing Coenties Slip.

By morning the fire, though balked, raged uncontrollably. Its domain—from Maiden Lane to

Coenties Slip, from William Street to the East River—was a thirteen-acre ocean of burning waves.

As if alive and determined to break out, it forayed out into the river, from which boats had been

hastily removed: gallons of blazing turpentine cascaded down the shore and rolled across the ice,

setting a few vessels on fire. The conflagration took another night and day to burn itself out. Even

then, thick black clouds spewed into the winter sky. It would not be completely quenched for two

weeks.

Troops were brought in the first night to control looting. Sentinels stood guard for days amid ruins

littered with charred merchandise: scorched silks, laces, prints, a “mountain of coffee” at the corner

of Old Slip and South Street. The night of the fire, over ninety people were seized in the act of

carrying away property; the next day, two hundred more were arrested. Hone ranted to his diary about

“the miserable wretches who prowled about the ruins, and became beastly drunk on the champagne

and other wines and liquors with which the streets and wharves were lined.” Worse, they “seemed to

exult in the misfortune, and such expressions were heard as ‘This will make the aristocracy haul in

their horns!’”

In the aftermath, voracious demands for information spurred the new penny press to innovative

heights. The Sun published a morning edition of twenty-three thousand and an “extra” of thirty

thousand, for a record-shattering one-day circulation of fiftythree thousand. The Herald, in its

December 21 issue, used illustrations for the first time: one two-column woodcut showed the remains

of the Merchant’s Exchange; another mapped the area of destruction. Nathaniel Currier, a twenty-twoyear-old lithographer from Massachusetts who had set up shop on Nassau Street the previous year,

leapt to prominence with his prints of the fire; one of them inspired a scene in Harrington’s New

Grand Moving Diorama, which opened at the American Museum in 1836.

In succeeding days, the press and others counted costs. Eighty buildings had burned on Front Street

alone, 674 in all. Almost every structure south of Wall and east of Broad was to some degree a

casualty. Estimates of losses in buildings and merchandise ranged from eighteen to twenty-six million

dollars, more than three times the cost of the Erie Canal. Twenty-three of the city’s twenty-six fire

insurance companies went bankrupt. Four thousand clerks were temporarily thrown out of work,

along with thousands of cartmen and porters.

The most telling statistics, however, were these: only two people died in the fire—a function of

the commercial district’s almost complete lack of residential housing. And within a year, five

hundred new buildings had been built, the area entirely restored, indeed dramatically improved—