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c h a p t e r f i v e Stables and the Built Environment Historians usually cite the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago in 1903, which took 603 lives, as the deadliest of urban fires, but on May 27, 1887, another conflagration had taken the lives of 1,185 New Yorkers, all male.1 The victims of the New York fire, like many inarticulate urban workers in the nineteenth century, left no historical record. These recent urban arrivals (there were probably very few native New Yorkers involved) died an extremely painful death, but the public displayed little pity; rather, people wondered how long it would take to replace the victims. Nobody conducted a memorial service or o¤ered them a decent burial. In fact, health authorities ordered their remains hastily dumped into the Hudson River. The New York fire has gone unnoticed by historians because it victimized a largely forgotten but major part of the nineteenth-century workforce—draft horses. At 1:30 in the morning, a fire had broken out in the three-story, brick stable of the Belt Line Street Railway (part of the Central Park, East and North River Railroad Company) on Tenth Avenue between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth streets. The company stabled 1,230 horses there, of which night watchmen saved only 45. Despite the brick walls, the building was highly flammable, with wooden frame, stalls, and floors. Moreover, the stable contained more than four thousand bales of hay, five thousand bales of straw, and twelve thousand bushels of grain. The conflagration evidently started in a paint locker in the first-floor room where the Belt Line Railway repaired its rolling stock (154 cars also went up in smoke). There does not seem to have been any attempt by the few rescued horses to rush back to their stalls or any “freezing” by those being rescued, a common problem in stable fires, probably because the flames spread too rapidly (the whole stable was gone within a half hour). The newspaper account described the “pathetic whinnies and cries” of dying horses locked in their stalls. The narrative also noted the heroism of the security guards and praised the courage of the New York fire fighters. They prevented the fire from spreading beyond a few nearby buildings, which housed about thirty families, so that only one human life was lost. Bizarrely , the stable’s five cats somehow survived and came crawling out of the wreckage the next day.2 The fire graphically indicated the problems of relying on the horse as a prime mover and stimulated a “growing public sentiment that big stables in a crowded city are dangerous nuisances.”3 The fire also illustrated one of the reasons why city residents did not want to live near stables. In theory, horse power was made up of thousands of independent sources not subject to systemic failure, like a twentieth-century power grid, but this fire and numerous epidemics proved otherwise . Systemic failure could and did occur. Stables were perhaps the weakest link in the system, since all-too-common stable fires and epidemics of contagious diseases, which spread as rapidly in densely populated horse stables as in densely populated human tenements, could disrupt vital power to entire neighborhoods, even entire cities. The Belt Line Street Railway served Fifty-ninth Street and both Manhattan waterfronts on a circular route. Those neighborhoods lost transit service for an extended time.4 The Times, as angry as most New Yorkers over the failure of equine power, editorially called for a form of “mechanical traction” to replace horses— the living machine. Reflecting this reality, the executive committee of the Belt Line met on the day after the fire to consider their options. Reportedly, the promoters of cable, electric station, and independent electric motor systems had been in touch with company oªcials since the fire. The executive committee concluded that “this was a good time to introduce another motor.” Thus, as the Times observed, “the fire is likely to be productive of an innovation in street car motive power.”5 At a time of rapid change in the technologies of urban transit, this was not an unrealistic position. The Ecology of Stables The horse in its role as a living machine, as we have discussed, shaped the ecological patterns of American cities, but cities also possessed their own ecology relating to horses’ metabolic and housing needs. The urban built environment reflected the city’s dependence on horses primarily in the...

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