Burning of the Merchants' Exchange, New York, December 16th & 17th, 1835
1835
Nicolino V. Calyo (1799 -1884)
Gouache on paper, 20 X 30
Signed lower left: Painted on the spot by / Nicolino Calyo
Bequest of Mrs. J. Insley Blair in memory of Mr. and Mrs.J. Insley Blair, 52.100.7

The Great Fire of 1835 broke out on the night of December 16 and, raging for more than fifteen hours, destroyed virtually the entire downtown business district, including the Merchants' Exchange, the Post Office, and more than half the city's insurance companies. This and earlier catastrophic fires caused so much destruction in New York that by mid-century none of the city's earliest Dutch buildings remained standing. Surpassing the earlier disasters, the Great Fire of 1835 not only lasted longer but also caused unprecedented physical damage and resulted in sweeping reform of the city's fire-fighting methods, building codes, and fire insurance practices.

The fire started about nine o'clock on a wintry evening in a store filled with dry goods and hardware. The bitter December cold froze the water in the fire hoses and in all nearby cisterns and wells. The resulting water shortage, combined with a fierce northerly wind that whipped the flames from building to building and block to block, hampered the heroic efforts to combat the disaster. By the time it was finally brought under control, the fire had demolished 674 buildings in the city's commercial heart, an area that extended from the East River nearly to Broad Street and from Coenties Slip to Wall Street.

In a night of enormous losses, the destruction of the Merchants' Exchange, symbol of the energetic growth of New York's business community, seemed particularly crushing. "The splendid edifice," wrote diarist and New York mayor Philip Hone, " & one of the ornaments of the city & is now a heap of ruins &. When the dome of this edifice fell in, the sight was awfully grand. In its fall it demolished the statue of Hamilton executed by Ball Hughes, which was erected in the rotunda only eight months ago by the public spirit of the merchants."¹

New York's insurance industry staggered under these losses. A short time later, banks suspended payment, resulting in many bankruptcies. The general inability of the volunteer fire-fighting units to contain the blaze led the Board of Assistant Aldermen to adopt a statement declaring "the absolute necessity of establishing a more perfect and proper organization of the Fire Department, and & the necessity and propriety of being better prepared to resist the ravages of fire." Along with the reorganization of the fire department to minimize time-wasting competition among the volunteer companies, the Assistant Aldermen rewrote the building codes to allow fire wagons easier access through the streets and to impose more fire-resistant construction methods. The preeminent need for an improved water supply served to expedite development of the Croton Water System (see plate 20). This major engineering feat solved more than one problem in an era when fire, dirt, and disease were endemic to urban living.

Nicolino Calyo, a Neapolitan painter who arrived in New York shortly before the Great Fire, probably found the drama of this disaster reminiscent of the fiery eruptions of Vesuvius that had traumatized generations in his native country. In the lower-left corner of this colorful view the artist depicted himself, muffled against the cold, at an easel situated on a rooftop affording him a perch from which to study the panoramic conflagration. The resulting image was one of a series of highly dramatic Great Fire views by Calyo, several of which provided the basis for William J. Bennett's aquatints published soon afterward.

Calyo was one of a number of émigré painters to nineteenth-century New York whose concern for local color and genre scenes helped to generate a new interest among America's art audience in paintings of everyday subjects. A pristine set of Calyo's New York Street Cries, Chanters and Views (a series of thirty-six watercolor portrayals of New York street vendors) resides in the Museum's collection, as do some of his richly colored panoramic gouache views of New York from various harbor and riverside vantage points.

Notes:

  1  The sculptor Robert Ball Hughes (1806 -1868) had executed a marble figure of Alexander Hamilton on commission from New York's merchants. A surviving plaster model is in the Museum's collection.