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By Root 8047 0

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 twenty-five 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