All day on 16 December 1835, a gale blanketed Manhattan with snow. The Pearl Street merchant Gabriel Disosway remembered how when night fell it was “the coldest one we had had for thirty-six years.” At nine that evening, members of the City Watch discovered a fire burning at Comstock & Andrews, a brick dry goods store 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.”
Chief Engineer James Gulick and fire crews raced to the blaze. Firemen tapped the nearby hydrants. In search of more water, crews headed to the foot of Wall Street to break through the ice on the East River and pump water. But it was so cold out that when they got the water moving, the strong wind slapped it back into their faces.
Lower Manhattan was filled with crooked streets, and within 15 minutes of the alarm, Watchman Hays realized that “fully fifty buildings were blazing.” Merchants desperately sought for places to move their goods before they were destroyed. Throughout downtown Manhattan—for a third of a mile from Broad to South Streets and a similar distance down to Coenties Slip—businesses emptied their buildings and piles of mahogany tables, sideboards, sofas, silks, satins, broadcloths, boxes of cutlery, and crates of expensive wine littered the streets. A prominent spot on the city’s eastern edge was the triangular-shaped Hanover Square through which Pearl Street ran. But as merchandise piled up, people streamed through and they trampled fabrics into the snow and mud, broke furniture, splintered boxes, and scattered bottles. Then, according to the Sun, “a gust of flame, like a streak of lightning,” came from the northeast corner building, and it shot “across the square, blown by the strong wind, and set fire to the entire mass, which it in a few moments consumed to cinders, and then communicated to the houses opposite.”
By 10 PM, everything seemed to be engulfed: “The bells ringing—the fire engines rolling—the foremen bawling—the wind blowing—the snow driving—the whole heavens above illuminated, formed altogether a terrific spectacle,” reported the New York Herald. It didn’t help that many of the firemen were exhausted from fighting fires on Water and Chrystie Streets from the night before. To compound matters, those fires had largely drained the city’s reservoir, and made it impossible to get enough pressure to shoot the water high enough.