• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

FIRE

One of the city’s most serious problems was its ongoing flammability. Reformers blamed the volunteer firefighters, whom they now set out to replace with a professional fire department. The volunteers were newly vulnerable to assault, as their prewar reputation for rowdyism had been reinforced by the behavior of some in their ranks during the draft riots. After Appomattox, moreover, their brawling had reached intolerable new heights. In one August 1865 shootout at a fire scene, two men were killed and eighty wounded, while the building they had come to rescue burned to char and cinders. For the insurance companies, which had to cover such losses, and for the local merchants, who were forced to pay premiums higher than anywhere else in the United States or Europe, the volunteer system was inexcusably inefficient. Republican reformers were also well aware that the companies were prime recruiting resources for the Democratic Party.

Republican legislators accordingly introduced a bill to replace the forty thousand volunteers with a thousand-man professional fire department, to be equipped with the horse-drawn, steam-powered pumpers that brawny volunteers had long resisted. In hearings on the bill, the insurance industry presented the damning evidence they had systematically collected that demonstrated exactly how costly the old amateur order was to the city and its property owners. Other urban centers, the insurance companies noted, had established professional departments, and the statistics made clear how much more effective Baltimore and Qncinnati’s systems were. Twenty-three banks, 109 insurance companies, and thirteen thousand citizens filed petitions on the measure’s behalf. Businessmen complained that having worker-volunteers down tools and race off whenever the fire bells rang was “incompatible with any steady pursuits of industry.” The police commissioner testified about rowdyism. Moral reformers charged that volunteers, who were allowed to bed down in the firehouses at public expense, had been bedding down with prostitutes, converting stations to de facto whorehouses.

The existing Board of Fire Commissioners offered feeble rebuttals but was ill equipped to controvert such charges. Sputtering was no match for statistics. The bill passed, weathered an immediate lawsuit challenging its constitutionality, and went briskly into effect. The new fire commissioners, moving swiftly to establish discipline, replaced competition between companies with a centralized command. The old system of summoning assistance by ringing the City Hall bell was replaced by an extensive network of fireboxes (by 1873 there were 548 boxes on Manhattan, connected by 612 miles of telegraph wire). Within a few years, annual losses from fire, and the amount of settlements paid out by insurance companies, had both dropped sharply, to widespread relief and applause.

HEALTH

Reformers also succeeded in establishing a Metropolitan Board of Health. Dr. John H. Griscom, who first called for creating a sanitary police back in the 1840s, had kept hammering at the issue throughout the 1850s and had been joined by other activist physicians like Joseph M. Smith, president (from 1854) of the New York Academy of Medicine. The doctors helped organize a New York Sanitary Association in 1859, which brought physicians together with civic-minded businessmen like Peter Cooper to agitate for change. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor signed on to the crusade, spurred like other reformers by the draft riots. “The mobs that held sway in our city,” the Citizens Association agreed, had been generated in “overcrowded neglected quarters.”

In 1864 the Citizens Association submitted a proposal for action to the state legislature. It went nowhere. The most vigorous resistance came, ironically, from the city inspector’s office (Griscom’s old department), which had oversight of sanitation. Inspectors opposed further transfer of municipal authority to Albany, partly