Fire at the Tombs
n.d. (depicting 1842)
Attributed to Albertis Del Orient Browere (1814 -1887)
Oil on canvas, 30 X 25
The J. Clarence Davies Collection, 29.100.1308

 

The city prison officially known as the Halls of Justice drew respectful reactions from contemporary observers as it rose on the site of the former Collect Pond, bounded by Leonard, Franklin, Lafayette, and Centre Streets. "It promises to be one of the handsomest of our public buildings," opined the Evening Post in 1837. "It is in the Egyptian style, a style well suited by its massiveness, severity and appearance of prodigious strength to edifices of this kind. We have no other examples in this city."¹

Designed by architect John Haviland, a specialist in penitentiary commissions, the fortress-like building, constructed in granite, stood ready to house New York's criminal population by August 1838 with a newly acquired name: the Tombs. This dramatic painting documents an incident associated with the incarceration of a well-to-do professional man, John C. Colt, brother of Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolver.

Colt, convicted of the gruesome hatchet murder of a local printer in 1841, was sentenced to die on November 18, 1842.² He prepared for the event by marrying his paramour in jail the day before his scheduled hanging, then he stabbed himself through the heart just hours before the execution was set to occur. In the confusion surrounding the suicide and its discovery, a lamp or candle evidently triggered a fire that traveled to the building's cupola, burning it down and destroying portions of the roof in the process. A fire-alarm bell had been ordered for installation in the tower structure the preceding April, but reports vary as to whether it was in place or operating when the conflagration erupted.

The scene shows flames consuming the tower above the Centre Street entrance to the Tombs. The prison's distinctive portico of four massive columns, with palm-leafed capitals, lofty two-story windows, and other decorative details are portrayed accurately.³ The picture emphasizes, however, the valiant, well-orchestrated labors of Southwark Engine Company 38, a volunteer troop organized under this banner in 1840, then stationed at Nassau Street near Cedar Street. Featured at center is the company's handsome, newly purchased extension-lever hand-engine, made in Philadelphia, which could throw water a horizontal distance of 180 feet. Activating the apparatus required forty-eight firemen -two rows standing on the ground, two positioned on fold-out platforms descending from the truck called "pumping brakes" -whose combined force compelled water out of a central tank through an attached goose-neck hose. The reach of the stream privileged Southwark Company as the local engine unit best equipped to extinguish flames on high, the predicament posed by the Tombs fire.

Other characteristics of fire brigades in this volunteer era of urban fire fighting are recognizable: the foreman's use of a brass fire trumpet, which often doubled as a megaphone; the fitted jackets and leather helmets with long back brims worn by company members, acquired at their own expense; and the spit-and-polish condition of the engine, with its burnished fittings -an object of unique decoration, lavish maintenance, and great company pride.⁴ The engine, drawn to the fire's location by four horses owned by the Adams Express Company, was subsequently pulled by hand into proximity with the blaze to be extinguished.⁵ Apparently, this situation's urgency has allowed several newcomers, lacking signature uniforms, to infiltrate the pump teams or has caused several company recruits to respond, hatless, in their haste. In the distance, other concerned citizens dash toward the scene of the disaster.

Based on other signed fire views that are close in style, Albertis D. O. Browere seems a likely candidate as painter. The engine of Southwark Company 38 appears in another canvas by Browere documenting a fire on Broadway in 1842, one of more than 2,500 fires that plagued New York City between 1837 and 1848.⁶ As with other of his "retrospective" urban views (see plate 7), Browere probably improvised the scene some years after the 1842 event.

Notes:

  1  New York Evening Post, April 1, 1837. New York City acquired a second major example of Egyptian or Coptic public architecture in 1842 with the construction of the Croton Distributing Reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, formerly known as Reservoir Square and the present-day site of the New York Public Library.

  2  Colt's sensational trial received extensive press coverage because of the malice of the crime and the social prominence of the perpetrator. For a contemporary account, see C. F. Powell, An Authentic Life of John C. Colt, Now Imprisoned for Killing Samuel Adams in New York, on the Seventeenth of September, 1841 (Boston: S. N. Dickinson, 1842).

  3  For a contemporary description of the prison's decorative program, see New-York as It Is: Containing a General Description of the City of New York: List of Officers, Pubic Institutions, and Other Useful Information . . . (New York: Colton and Disturnell, 1839), pp. 24 -25.

  4  The large 91/2-inch-cylinder Southwark Engine, built by John Agnew of Philadelphia, was the object of much envy by other volunteer companies in New York and received elaborate ornamentation, including painted panels and gleaming fittings made of "Prince's metal." For descriptions of its decorations and operations, see George W. Sheldon, Story of the Volunteer Fire Departments of the City of New York (New York, 1882), pp. 505, 530 -531.

  5  Steam engines were introduced into New York City's fire-fighting arsenal in 1855 over the resistance of many volunteers, who saw this innovation as jeopardizing their indispensability to the task of fire suppression. In 1865 the City of New York replaced volunteer brigades with a paid fire department.

  6  The inscription discernible on the engine in the painting shown here reads: Southwark / 38 / John Agnew / No. 402 / Philada. Engine Company 38 acquired its "Southwark" engine around 1840, two years before the fire at the Tombs. This same volunteer company and engine reappear in Browere's painting Fire at Broadway and Cedar Street (1842), also in the Museum's collection (acc. no. 29.100.1310).