Excerpt, Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments, 1887

Fires were frequent and devastating occurrences in nineteenth-century New York, a growing city full of wooden buildings and serviced by a loosely organized group of volunteer fire companies. In 1865, the state legislature established the Metropolitan Fire Department, the city's first professional fire fighting force, a move motivated in large part by politics: the volunteer fire companies were associated with the Democratic Party while the state legislature was dominated by Republicans. This brief passage from Augustine Costello's A History of the New York Fire Departments, Volunteer and Paid, from 1609 to 1887 describes the fires that destroyed the American Museum in 1865 and the rebuilt Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum and Menagerie Company in 1868.

On July 13 a famous place of amusement was destroyed--Barnum's Museum, which then stood at the corner of Ann Street and Broadway. It was about noon when the fire broke out, and at that hour there were few persons in the building, so that no human lives were lost, but half a million dollars' worth of property was destroyed. It was a unique scene, and afforded opportunity for a great deal of graphic and humorous writing in the press. The firemen had much fun with the monkeys, the whale, the bear and the "Happy Family." The Fat Lady and the Giantess were handed out in safety with the tenderest solicitude for their welfare. Several of the ladies said they were completely smitten with the wooly-headed Albino woman. The enterprising Barnum soon erected another and a more splendid edifice, the burning of which gave occasion for similar gallantry on the part of the New Department in 1868.

But serious and almost tragic affair took place about the same time in Forty-fourth Street, west of Eighth Avenue. This was the site of the old village of Bloomingdale, where vegetable markets abounded. Several houses were on fire, and at an upper window of one of them a woman appeared with a child in her arms. The fire at Barnum's left this locality short of its complement of engines, and no hook and ladder company was at hand. . . .

Burning of Barnum's Museum

Source: Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments, A.E. Costello, Author and Publisher, 1887 pp. 267-8.