Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [476]
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