Shows vividly how the Great Fire of 1835, which nearly leveled
Manhattan also created the ashes from which the city was reborn. On
a freezing December night almost two centuries ago, a fire erupted
in lower Manhattan. The city's inhabitants, though accustomed to
blazes in a town with so many wooden structures, a spotty water
supply, and a decentralized fire department, looked on in horror at
the scale of this one. Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York,
wrote in his diary 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." By the time
the fire was extinguished, a huge swath of land had been
transformed from a thriving business center into the "Burnt
District," an area roughly the same size as was devastated during
the September 11th attack. In the end, nearly 700 buildings were
destroyed. So vast was the conflagration that it was immediately
and henceforth known as the Great Fire of 1835. Manhattan Phoenix
reveals how New York emerged from the disaster to become a global
powerhouse merely a quarter of a century later. Daniel S. Levy's
book charts the city's almost miraculous growth during the early
19th century by focusing on the topics that shaped its destiny,
starting with fire but including water, land, disease, culture, and
politics, interweaving the lives of New Yorkers who took part in
its transformation. Some are well-known, including the land baron
John Jacob Astor. Others less so, as with the Bowery Theatre
impresario Thomas Hamblin and the African-American restaurateur
Thomas Downing. The book celebrates Fire Chief James Gulick, who
battled the Great Fire, examines the designs of the architect
Alexander Jackson Davis who built marble palaces for the rich,
follows the abolitionist Arthur Tappan, chronicles the career of
the merchant Alexander Stewart, and reveals how the engineer John
Bloomfield Jervis succeeded in bringing clean water into homes. The
city's resurrection likewise owed much to such visionaries as
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park,
creating the refuge that it remains to this day. Manhattan Phoenix
offers the story of a city rising from the ashes to fulfill its
destiny to grow into one of the world's greatest metropolises-and
in no small part due to catastrophe. It is, in other words, a New
York story.
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