Fighting Fire! Read online

  The flames in the warehouses, recalled volunteer firefighter Gabriel O. Disoway, made the closed iron shutters shine “with glowing redness, until at last forced open by the uncontrollable enemy. Within, they represented the appearance of an immense iron furnace in full blast.” The heat exceeded 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, melting shutters and copper roofs.

  Nathaniel Currier’s lithograph of the first night of the big blaze sold thousands of copies in just a few days. [LOC, USZ62-2553]

  By 12:30 A.M., the wind had driven the fire north to Wall Street. Then, as now, it was the heart of New York’s business district. “I stood at the corner of Wall and Pearl Street, where there is an open space like a funnel,” William Callender recalled. “The fire in great sheets of flame leaped across that space, cavorting around in maddening fury.”

  A lithograph by Nathaniel Currier showing a view of the great fire from the water. [LOC, USZ62-50387]

  Confident that the new three-story marble Merchants’ Exchange wouldn’t burn, people filled it with merchandise saved from burning warehouses and stores. But soon the Merchants’ Exchange as well as the nearby post office, banks, and churches were ablaze. “Street after street caught the terrible torrent,” observed writer Augustine E. Costello, “until acre after acre was booming an ocean of flame.”

  Thousands of rowdy people watched. Two were killed. One person burned to death, and a mob lynched a man caught setting a fire. While many citizens helped firefighters, some stole hats, wine, and other merchandise that was piled in the streets. The police arrested three hundred people for looting. The less ambitious got drunk on stolen liquor and cheered the spectacular fire.

  Turpentine stored in burning warehouses by the river exploded. “The water looked like a sea of blood,” wrote Costello. “Clouds of smoke, like dark mountains suddenly rising in the air, were succeeded by long banners of flame.”

  Mayor Cornelius Lawrence was worried the blaze would spread north of Wall Street to the residential neighborhoods. A firebreak, he decided, might stop it. Sailors and marines from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, across the East River, used kegs of gunpowder to blow up several buildings on Exchange Place. The firebreak worked. But below Wall Street, the blaze lasted eight more hours, dying only when nothing was left to burn.

  The city’s financial and commercial district—674 buildings on 17 city blocks—was smoldering rubble. “The heart of the city seemed to have ceased to exist,” observed Costello. “Of business there was none. New York was stricken as with paralysis.”

  The estimated financial loss was as high as forty million dollars. That would be about one billion dollars in today’s money. Unable to pay all the claims, 23 of the city’s 26 fire insurance companies went bankrupt. Without insurance money to replace losses, many other businesses failed. By destroying the center of American commerce, some historians believe, New York’s Great Fire of 1835 added to the economic problems that a year later caused the worst recession the young nation had experienced.

  This is a painting by the Italian-born artist Nicolino Calyo, an eyewitness to the fire. [New York City Fire Museum]

  City officials and insurance companies wanted a reliable water supply to make New York safer. Construction of the Croton Water System began in 1837. Five years and twelve million dollars later, New York had the world’s biggest, most modern water system. Some 35 million gallons of water a day from reservoirs 41 miles north of the city flowed through iron pipes to fortress-like receiving reservoirs on Manhattan Island. The Croton Water System, like the Erie Canal before it and the Brooklyn Bridge after it, was one of the nineteenth century’s great engineering feats.

  A Currier & Ives depiction of New York several years after the fire. [LOC, DIG-pga-03183]

  3

  AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS FIRE

  CHICAGO, 1871

  Unlike New York City 36 years earlier, Chicago had a state-of-the-art water system when America’s most famous fire began on October 8, 1871.

  That Sunday evening, Robert A. Williams, the Chicago Fire Department’s 43-year-old chief marshal, was getting some much-needed sleep. Earlier, he and his entire department of 185 firemen had spent 16 hours battling a lumber mill fire that destroyed four city blocks. His men were not only tired but also hurting from swollen eyes, blistered skin, and lungs raw from breathing heat and smoke. Williams had been in bed only a couple of hours when, just after 9:00 P.M., his wife woke him with news of another fire.

  It had started in a barn behind Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s home at 137 DeKoven Street. There was a popular belief that a cow had kicked over a kerosene lantern. Mrs. O’Leary did keep a cow so that she could sell milk, but that urban myth has been discredited. In fact, no one knows how the fire began. Some people suspect a smoker passing by carelessly tossed a lit cigarette into the hay.

  A neighbor discovered the blaze and alerted the O’Learys. More neighbors helped save the family’s furniture. Nearly thirty minutes passed before someone thought to turn in a fire alarm.

  A Chicago Fire Department (CFD) sentinel downtown in the courthouse cupola spotted the smoke. But he assumed the smoke was coming from the smoldering mill fire, which had been near the O’Leary home, and didn’t report it.

  Chicago, which residents called “the Gem of the Prairie,” was the biggest city in the Midwest. In just four decades, it had burgeoned from a frontier settlement of a few hundred people along Lake Michigan to a metropolis of some 300,000. Residents built homes and stores with cheap, plentiful lumber from nearby Wisconsin forests. Along Lake Michigan’s marshy shore, they even laid 55 miles of pine-board streets and 600 miles of pine-board sidewalks.

  Chicago’s State Street was one of the world’s busiest thoroughfares in the nineteenth century. [Chicago History Museum]

  In the downtown business district, now known as the Loop, many of the new buildings were said to be fireproof. They included the two-year-old limestone and iron Water Works Pumping Station. It was part of a new water system that, like New York’s, had been an engineering feat.

  Back in 1864, Chicago’s officials had decided the water along the shore was too polluted for the city’s residents. Hundreds of Irish immigrant workers began digging a five-foot-wide tunnel thirty feet beneath the bottom of Lake Michigan; it would stretch two miles from shore in order to supply fresh water to the city. Using only picks and shovels, the workers labored around the clock six days a week for nearly three years. They completed the Lake Tunnel in 1867, and two years later they finished the Water Works Pumping Station and its 15-story tower, one of the city’s tallest structures.

  Chicago also had installed street call boxes. Fire-prone Boston had installed the first ones in the early 1850s. The small house-shaped boxes were mounted on poles throughout the city. To report a fire, a person pulled a lever, which sent a telegraph signal to the Chicago Fire Department (CFD) and indicated the fire’s location.

  The CFD also had horse-drawn steam engines that could shoot six hundred gallons of water a minute as far as two-thirds the length of a football field. English inventors half a century earlier had built the first steam-powered fire engines, but it took years to make them reliable. A company in Cincinnati, Ohio, made one of the first successful American models. That 22,000-pound engine, named Uncle Joe Ross, pumped water through six hoses.

  Cities that bought these expensive engines wanted them operated by trained full-time firefighters, so they replaced volunteers with paid professionals. Cincinnati formed the nation’s first professional department in 1853. Five years later, Chicago’s City Council created the CFD. But the council pinched pennies when it came to funding. The 185 full-time firefighters weren’t enough for the sprawling city. The CFD wanted more fireboats on the Chicago River, which was lined by lumberyards, coal yards, warehouses, and wharves. And it also wanted building inspectors, because poorly constructed and maintained structures were fire threats.

  But the business community opposed raising taxes to pay for a bigger fire department. It also oppo
sed stricter building codes that would make new construction more expensive. This shortsightedness, it turned out, was costly.

  When an artist in St. Louis heard about the Chicago fire, he rushed to the Illinois city by train. His sketches are among the few by an eyewitness. [LOC, USZ62-109590]

  By the time Chief Marshal Williams arrived at the fire on the night of October 8, two blocks of the crowded Irish immigrant neighborhood were in flames. Little rain had fallen in three months, so everything was bone-dry. Only the men with the engines America and Little Giant had turned out, which is a fireman’s phrase meaning responded. Williams immediately sent a second alarm, requesting more engines.

  The chief marshal positioned his men and pumpers around the burning houses, and they sprayed thousands of gallons of water on the flames. Just as the fire appeared to be under control, a southwesterly wind picked up and fanned the flames higher.

  As the inferno grew, the heat radiated hundreds of feet, causing trees and buildings to burst into flame. The strong updraft created a wind, or convection current, called a firestorm. “The wind had increased to a tempest,” a resident recalled, “and hurled great blazing brands over our heads.” Five blocks from the O’Leary home, airborne embers ignited the steeple on St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church. More firebrands, like tiny paratroopers of an invading army, floated down onto lumberyards and furniture factories. At 10:30, Williams turned in a third alarm, bringing out all the CFD’s 15 steam fire engines.

  Beyond the church was the 400-foot-wide South Branch of the Chicago River. The intense heat ignited the coal yards and lumberyards along the river and burned boats and barges. Flames even danced on the water, which was covered by grease, oil, and other industrial waste. Soon buildings across the river were ablaze.

  With the fire spreading so rapidly, Chief Marshal Williams desperately wanted more men and equipment. Mayor Roswell B. Mason telegraphed St. Louis, Milwaukee, Dayton, Fort Wayne, and other nearby cities. “CHICAGO IS IN FLAMES,” read his message to Milwaukee’s mayor. “SEND YOUR WHOLE DEPARTMENT TO HELP US.”

  Across the South Branch, the inferno spread to Conley’s Patch, a neighborhood of German, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants. It burned the Gas Works, where, fortunately, workers had shut down the pipes to prevent an explosion.

  Flames leaping high in the air swept downtown, engulfing the city’s best-known buildings—the Chamber of Commerce, the Chicago Times Building, the Chicago Academy of Music, Crosby’s Opera House, the post office, the Custom House, Booksellers’ Row, the Palmer Hotel, and Marshall Field’s, a six-story department store dubbed “the marble palace,” which occupied a whole city block.

  The 10,849-pound brass bell in the cupola atop the new limestone courthouse swayed in the wind, ringing nonstop. After the interior of the courthouse caught fire, the guard in the basement jail released the 160 prisoners, telling them to run for their lives. Minutes later, its supports weakened by fire, the brass bell plunged through five floors to the basement. The impact thundered across the city.

  “Suddenly there came a crash like a broadside of artillery,” said Samuel S. Greeley, who was watching from the roof of his home north of downtown, “and a vast jet of smoke and sparks shot to heaven. It almost seemed to me, at nearly a mile away, that I felt the earth tremble.”

  Like many onlookers at big fires, Greeley was mesmerized. “The scene was now indescribably grand and awful. In the half hour that I had passed upon my roof, the fire had leaped forward with frightful speed, and was beginning to break out in detached spots in advance of the terrible mass. The wind had risen, and was now blowing almost a gale; the masses of floating fire from roofs and warehouses were more numerous, and more fiery, and the roar of flames and of falling walls was more appalling.”

  Soon the fire jumped the Chicago River’s North Branch and invaded the neighborhoods where Greeley and 75,000 other people lived. Few residents had begun evacuating because they didn’t think the blaze would spread so far so fast. Suddenly, the streets became “a torrent of humanity,” one man said, “gorged with horses pulling wagons piled high with furniture. Mobs of men and women rushed wildly from street to street screaming, gesticulating and shouting.”

  This map shows the vast section of Chicago destroyed by the fire. [LOC, USZ62-67787]

  One of the main avenues, a visiting New Yorker later wrote, “was utterly choked with all manner of goods and people.… Valuable oil paintings, books, pet animals, musical instruments, toys, mirrors, and bedding, were trampled under foot.”

  While many people raced to the city’s outskirts, an estimated thirty thousand found refuge in one of the few open spaces downtown: Lincoln Park, along Lake Michigan. “In some instances whole families were huddled around their little piles of furniture, which was all they had left,” Judge Lambert Tree recalled. “Here and there a mother sat upon the ground clinging to her infant, with one or more little ones, who, exhausted by the prolonged interruptions to their slumbers, were now sleeping.” A number of people spent the night standing in the cold lake.

  A Currier & Ives depiction of the fire from Lake Michigan. [LOC, DIG-pga-00762]

  After the fire, State Street was no longer one of the world’s busiest streets. [Chicago History Museum]

  All hope was lost when, at 3:00 A.M. on Monday, the firefighters’ hoses went limp. Sparks had fallen through the Water Works building’s ventilators, setting the interior ablaze and causing the roof to collapse onto the water pumps. The fire continued burning, reaching Division Street, a mile north of the river, until it began to rain that evening.

  A panoramic view of the destruction. [LOC, USZC4-9440]

  No one had seen such destruction since the Civil War, which had ended six years earlier. “Heaps of ruins and here and there a standing wall, as far as the eye could reach,” a resident wrote. The fire burned a swath through the city three-quarters of a mile wide and four miles long. A third of the population, 100,000 people, was homeless. Officials believed some 300 people died, but they found the remains of only 120. The city lost 17,500 buildings, nearly a third of the 59,500 structures standing the previous week. The financial loss was a staggering $222 million, which would be about $4 billion today.

  Some losses were priceless. The fire destroyed the Chicago Historical Society. Its treasures included Abraham Lincoln’s original Emancipation Proclamation.

  The O’Leary home, where the Great Chicago Fire began, didn’t burn because of the prevailing winds. [LOC, USZ62-57060]

  Despite the widespread devastation, the city rebuilt quickly. Workers shoveled the bricks, limestone, and other rubble into Lake Michigan as landfill. Residents hastily put up wooden homes and stores. A few years later, a new style of structure appeared that changed skylines around the world.

  A mid-twentieth-century cartoon showing Mrs. O’Leary’s cow imagining a city of skyscrapers as she intentionally kicks over the lantern. [LOC, DIG-ppmsca-09127]

  The world’s first steel-framed skyscraper—the ten-story Home Insurance Building in downtown Chicago—was finished in 1885. By the end of the century, Chicago was becoming a city of steel skyscrapers. It even inspired a style of modern architecture known as the Chicago School.

  Today, the Chicago Fire Academy stands where the O’Leary barn once stood. And each year the nation is reminded of Chicago’s Great Fire because National Fire Prevention Week is observed the week of October 8.

  4

  NEW CENTURY, OLD PROBLEM

  BALTIMORE, 1904

  For centuries, people thought the fires that regularly laid waste to cities were unavoidable. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, electric lights, combustion engines, telephones, and other innovations were making life easier. It seemed that the science and technology that made these possible would also make fire less of a threat.

  In 1904, Baltimore, Maryland, with a population of 500,000 people, was America’s sixth-largest city. Ships from all over the world filled its busy harbor. In the nearby central business distric
t, skyscrapers cast shadows over colonial-era churches and row houses. Daniel Burnham, a famous Chicago School architect, had designed Baltimore’s tallest structure, the 16-story Continental Trust Building. This and the other steel and concrete buildings had the latest fire safeguards, such as automatic alarms connected to the Baltimore City Fire Department and automatic sprinklers, which were patented soon after the Great Chicago Fire. Several of the new structures were supposed to be fireproof.

  Baltimore had relied on volunteer firefighters for more than a century. By the 1850s, volunteer companies there and in other cities had become warring gangs, skirmishing in the streets, burning one another’s engine houses, and even battling over who got to fight a fire. An official in Cincinnati called his city’s volunteer fire companies “nurseries where the youth of the city are trained in vice, vulgarity, and debauchery.” Wanting more reliable service, Baltimore created a full-time professional fire department in 1858.

  But like Chicago years earlier, the growing Maryland seaport hadn’t invested enough money in fire prevention. It needed a better water supply. And in the densely populated business district, hydrants were old and few, which became a big problem on February 7, 1904.

  On that cold Sunday, the alarm from John E. Hurst & Company’s wholesale dry goods building downtown on German Street sounded at Baltimore City Fire Department (BCFD) headquarters at 10:48 A.M. The men of Engine Company No. 15 turned out, wearing heavy coats to keep them dry and insulated from heat and hard leather helmets to protect them from falling debris.

  The Washington, D.C., fire chief rushing from the train station to the fire. [LOC, DIG-npcc-18727]