New York has been rebuilt by fire three times, and each rebuilding left a mark you can still walk past. The first destroyed the colonial town. The second wiped out the commercial district and produced the granite and brick architecture that survives in Lower Manhattan. The third killed 146 people in eighteen minutes and produced most of the workplace safety law in the United States.
1776: the fire nobody has ever explained
The British took New York in September 1776 after Washington’s army was routed on Long Island and withdrew north. Six days after the occupation began, in the early hours of 21 September, fire broke out near Whitehall Slip at the southern tip of the island.
A dry summer, a strong south-westerly wind and a town of timber buildings did the rest. The fire ran north-west along the line of Broadway and burned somewhere between 400 and 1,000 buildings — around a quarter of the city — including Trinity Church, whose spire went up like a torch and was visible for miles.
St Paul’s Chapel survived because a bucket brigade stood on its roof putting out embers. It is still standing, the only pre-Revolutionary church building left in Manhattan.
Nobody knows who started it. The British were certain it was American arson and hanged or beat to death an unknown number of suspects on the spot. Washington had asked Congress for permission to burn the city rather than leave it to the enemy and had been refused, and he wrote afterwards that “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.” A second fire in 1778 destroyed much of what was left.
The city spent the next seven years under British occupation, with a burnt quarter known as Canvas Town where the poor lived in tents pitched in the ruins.
1835: the Great Fire
On the night of 16 December 1835, in a temperature of minus seventeen Celsius, a fire started in a warehouse on Merchant Street. The East River had frozen. The hydrants had frozen. The volunteer fire companies — exhausted from fighting another fire the night before — could not get water.
It burned for two days and destroyed almost the entire business district: between 600 and 700 buildings across seventeen city blocks south of Wall Street. The old Merchants’ Exchange went, along with virtually every commercial building in the Dutch-era heart of the city. It was finally stopped by blowing up buildings with gunpowder from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to create firebreaks.
Almost every fire insurance company in New York was bankrupted overnight.
What followed was a rebuilding in fireproof materials — granite, brick and iron rather than wood — and a set of consequences that shaped the city permanently. The city built the Croton Aqueduct, opened in 1842, bringing water forty-one miles from Westchester into a distributing reservoir on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. That reservoir is now the site of the New York Public Library, and the aqueduct gave New York, for the first time, both drinking water and fire hydrants that worked.
The volunteer fire companies — rowdy, politically connected and prone to fighting each other over who reached a hydrant first — were replaced by a paid professional department in 1865.
1911: the Triangle Shirtwaist factory
On Saturday 25 March 1911, about 500 workers were finishing a shift on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building on Washington Place, just east of Washington Square Park. Most were young immigrant women, Italian and Jewish, many of them teenagers. The youngest who died were fourteen.
A fire started in a scrap bin on the eighth floor at about 4:40pm. The building was legally fireproof and it survived; the people inside did not. The exit doors on the ninth floor had been locked to prevent workers leaving with stolen goods. The single fire escape twisted and collapsed under the weight of people on it. The fire department’s ladders reached the sixth floor.
Sixty-two people jumped. A crowd on the street watched them land. The whole thing took about eighteen minutes and killed 146 people.
The owners were tried for manslaughter and acquitted. They later collected insurance that exceeded their losses.
What the third fire changed
The public reaction was enormous and sustained. A Factory Investigating Commission was set up under Robert Wagner and Al Smith, with Frances Perkins — who had watched the fire from the street — as an investigator. Over four years it inspected thousands of workplaces and produced a body of legislation covering fire exits, sprinklers, occupancy limits, working hours for women and children, and factory inspection, that became the model for the rest of the country.
Perkins went on to be Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, the first woman in an American cabinet, and the architect of a large part of the New Deal. She described the Triangle fire as the day the New Deal began.
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which had organised a strike at the same factory two years earlier over exactly these conditions and lost, became one of the largest unions in America.
Where to see it
The Asch Building still stands, at 23–29 Washington Place on the corner of Greene Street. It belongs to New York University now and is called the Brown Building. There is a plaque, and since 2023 a permanent memorial — a steel ribbon running along the eighth and ninth floors and down the corner, with the names cut into it.
Fire escapes on the outside of tenement buildings across the Lower East Side and East Village are a legacy of the earlier reform laws. So are the airshafts in every tenement built after 1901.