Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [478]
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—testimony to the underlying strength of the mercantile economy and the tremendous momentum of the real estate boom.
PHOENIX
On December 19, less than two weeks after the fire, city officials, bankers, brokers, manufacturers, and merchants met to map the course of recovery. A committee of 125 citizens—“all the best and most influential men in the city,” said Hone—turned to the tasks of thanking neighbors (Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Newark), providing emergency relief, investigating the fire, and applying for aid from the federal, state, and city governments.
Former treasury secretary Albert Gallatin and Mayor Lawrence went to Washington, where Lawrence argued that the national government should consider itself as “a large capitalist, with an overflowing treasury . . . whose duty it is to promote the welfare and prosperity of the people.” Congress kept its treasure to itself, though it did audiorize the Treasury to remit duties already paid on imports newly destroyed and to extend the time importers had to pay duties on goods that survived.
Philip Hone’s delegation fared better in Albany. In January 1835 the state authorized the city to float a loan of up to six million dollars, a new precedent for disaster relief. Municipal authorities borrowed a million, then provided loans at 5 percent, increasing the credit available in the city. The Canal Commission doubled this line of credit by shifting another million of its funds to the city’s banks, thus allowing them to accommodate strapped customers and forestall mercantile failures.
In the meantime, business went on virtually uninterrupted. The stock exchange resumed trading after four days. Over six hundred dislodged firms set up operations in temporary accommodations nearby, driving rental prices in lower Manhattan up by 100 to 150 percent almost overnight. That instant boomlet triggered a far bigger one. The area’s businesses had long been trying to insert their nineteenth-century institutions into seventeenth-century streets by widening them one at a time, at great expense. The calamity, by demolishing the old structures, opened the way to transform crooked alleys into straight, broad, gas-lit thoroughfares. City officials announced plans to render “the entire surface of that section much cleaner, drier and more eligible for the transaction of business than it has heretofore been.”
This promise, coupled with the bid-up of prices by dislocated firms, sent land values soaring. Within a month, Hone noted, lots in the “burnt district” were selling “at most enormous prices, greater than they would have brought before the fire, when covered with valuable buildings.” One parcel of lots purchased earlier in the century for ninety-three thousand dollars