Horses, Hoses, and Hell: The New York City Fire Department from 1890 to 1970s in Photos

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire and what it forced

On March 25, 1911, fire broke out on the top three floors of the Asch Building on Washington Place in Greenwich Village. The building held the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a garment factory with around 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women. The fire moved through the floors in minutes. The stairwell doors on the eighth and ninth floors were locked from the outside — a common factory practice meant to prevent workers from taking breaks. The exits were not enough. One hundred and forty-six people died, many of them jumping from the ninth-floor windows because the heat left no other choice.

The FDNY’s tallest ladder that day reached only to the sixth floor. The department had no equipment that could reach the top floors of a ten-story building from the street. Firefighters watched people fall and could do nothing. That single fact — the ladder height — drove the department to push the city for funding on aerial ladder trucks that could reach eight, nine, and ten stories. Within four years of the Triangle fire, the FDNY had deployed new 85-foot aerial ladders across Manhattan.

Going from horses to gasoline

The FDNY began testing its first motorized fire engine in 1910. By 1922, the last horse-drawn apparatus in the city was retired. The transition took twelve years, which was deliberate — the department replaced horses borough by borough, company by company, as funding allowed and as mechanics were trained to maintain internal combustion engines. The horses themselves were auctioned off, mostly to farms in New Jersey and upstate New York.

Motorized engines changed response times dramatically. A horse could sustain a full run for about half a mile before tiring. A gasoline engine did not tire. Companies that covered large geographic areas — particularly in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, which were growing fast — could now respond to calls two and three miles away without the vehicle slowing down.

Breathing apparatus and the fire that changed safety

For most of the department’s early history, firefighters entered smoke-filled buildings with no breathing protection at all. They went in low, breathed shallowly, and got out when they started to feel dizzy. Carbon monoxide poisoning was common, and firefighters often did not recognize it until they collapsed. The department experimented with early smoke masks in the 1910s and 1920s, but widespread use of self-contained breathing apparatus — tanks of compressed air carried on the back — did not happen until the late 1940s and into the 1950s.

The shift to synthetic materials in building construction after World War II made this equipment absolutely necessary. Burning plastic, rubber insulation, and synthetic fabrics produce toxic gases that incapacitate within a few breaths. A firefighter in 1950 entering a burning apartment in a postwar housing project faced a chemically different environment than one entering a burning tenement in 1910. The department updated its gear accordingly, and by the late 1950s, air tanks were standard issue across all five boroughs.

The South Bronx: the burning decade

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, the South Bronx became one of the most fire-damaged urban areas in American history. Landlords abandoned buildings as tenants left for suburbs and city services deteriorated. Some buildings were set on fire for insurance money. Others burned from neglect — broken boilers, exposed wiring, and no maintenance. The FDNY companies based in the Bronx — particularly Engine 82 and Ladder 31 on Intervale Avenue — ran more fire calls per year than almost any firehouse in the country.

Engine 82 in the South Bronx answered over 6,000 alarms in a single year during the early 1970s. For comparison, a busy firehouse in a stable neighborhood handled 1,500 to 2,000. The firefighters based there worked in twelve-hour tours with little downtime between runs. Dennis Smith, a firefighter stationed at Engine 82, wrote about this period in his 1972 book “Report from Engine Co. 82,” which gave the public its first detailed look at what the South Bronx fire crisis actually looked like from inside a firehouse.

The fires burned through entire city blocks. Charlotte Street in the South Bronx, which had been a dense residential neighborhood in 1960, was open rubble by 1977. The FDNY could not stop the burning because the fires were not caused by accidents — they were caused by poverty, abandonment, and a city government that had stopped investing in those neighborhoods. Firefighters put out what they could and came back the next night for more.