Daniel S. Levy: The Great Fire of 1835 helped create modern New York City
remembered how when night arrived it was “the coldest one we had had for thirty-six years.” Then at 9 p.m., members of the City Watch discovered a fire burning at Comstock & Andrews on Merchant Street. Officer William Hays recalled how “We found the whole interior of the building in flames from cellar to roof … Almost immediately the flames broke through the roof.”
rushed down from his Broadway home, and later wrote how “the progress of the flames, like flashes of lightning, communicated in every direction, and a few minutes sufficed to level the lofty edifices on every side.”merchants seeking to save their stock emptied shops, and mahogany tables, crates of wine, silks, broadcloths, and boxes of cutlery cluttered the streets. A prominent spot on the city’s eastern edge was Hanover Square. But as goods piled up, people trampled fabrics and broke furniture.
At one in the morning, all the fire hoses laid frozen, and Mayor Cornelius Lawrence, fire chief James Gulick, James Alexander Hamilton—Alexander Hamilton’s son—and others decided they needed to blow up buildings to create a fire break and staunch the flames. Hamilton scoured stores for gunpowder. New Yorkeditor Charles King set off for the Brooklyn Navy Yard to seek more explosives.
The area of the Great Fire was largely a business district, and only a few people died. The fire, however, destroyed 674 buildings at a cost of $20 million, equivalent to $600 million today. James Gordon Bennett toured what quickly became known as “Burnt District.
At the time, New York City sat on the southern end of the island, and while a street grid had been established for Manhattan, the built city only stretched up to about 14th St. Villages and farms dotted the land to the north. But as the downtown recovered, avenues were extended, new homes went up, businesses and congregations seeking more space abandoned their old offices and sanctuaries and created larger ones further uptown.
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