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c h a p t e r s i x Becoming Heroes: A New Standard for Urban Fire Safety, 1875–1900 When Truck Company D arrived at St. Louis’s Southern Hotel in 1877, it found the building engulfed in flames. Above the pyre, almost a dozen people dangled from windows. The company hurriedly maneuvered its ladder truck along Fourth Street—impeded by streetcar tracks and blocked from the hotel’s upper reaches by porches. Phelim O’Toole, a former sailor and twice commended fireman, scurried up the ladder only to find himself five feet away from the ledge where six stranded people anxiously balanced. Drawing upon years of experience, O’Toole demanded their only clothing—the bedding they had hastily wrapped around themselves. One man—a professor of English—balked, demanding, “What do you want with them?” Above the din of flames and wind, O’Toole yelled, “You pass them down and I’ll save your lives.” True to his word, O’Toole fashioned a rope and lifted himself to the ledge. Battling choking smoke and blinding heat, he methodically lowered the professor and his family, one by one. Then, moving to another sill, O’Toole removed another man and two women to safety. He recalled, “It got pretty hot and smoky up there, but I did my best.” If the firemen thought that their night’s work was finished, the blaze had other plans. Fire Chief Lindsay spotted a man hanging in another window about to be consumed by the raging flames, and he ordered Truck Company D to reposition A New Standard for Urban Fire Safety 203 its apparatus. But, again, the ladder could not reach the stranded man. As O’Toole worked frantically to get to him, the man, frightened by the impending flames, threatened to jump. O’Toole implored him to stand pat, until the company maneuvered its truck closer. As O’Toole recounted, “We ran the truck into a shape that a truck never did work in this country, or any other, and never will again, though it did that time. It had nothing to support it; so we threw her against the wall some distance below the window.” Without solid support, O’Toole ascended the ladder. He commanded the man to dangle from the sill. As the window crackled and exploded, O’Toole took firm hold of the ladder with his legs and feet, and leaned forward to gain better purchase. He grabbed the man’s feet, and yelled “drop.” Down he went, but O’Toole grasped him, struggling against gravity for nearly a minute. O’Toole remembered that the man “was very much excited, and we were hard set to get him off the ladder.” Only moments after the company withdrew , the Fourth Street side of the Southern Hotel cascaded onto the street.1 Phelim O’Toole’s heroism came at a time when firefighters in American cities were reorganizing their work and establishing the boundaries of their occupation. O’Toole’s story illustrates some of the skills, tools, and apparatus that firefighters adopted as they refined their work techniques in relation to the physical and cultural dimensions of rapidly changing nineteenth-century cities. Firefighters remade the labor and the mission of urban fire departments when they fought fires more aggressively and faced an increasing amount of hazard as they penetrated deep inside the shakily built urban infrastructure. Firefighters also discovered a framework and rationale for their occupation as they began to rescue more and more people trapped by flames. Encouraged by a popular press that celebrated their work, firefighters became icons. Thus narratives of firefighting heroism de- fined their occupational boundaries, providing firemen considerable social and political authority, and justifying their interventions in the landscape. Firemen made possible the headlong rush of urban development even as it was routinely threatened by environmental catastrophe. Repeated failures of public officials, insurers, engineers, and capitalists to protect urban America from fire fostered disorder in cities and provided the space in which firefighters established heroic credentials. Further accentuated by the headlong rush of capitalist development, this crisis was felt perhaps most acutely in working-class communities, which often had to face harrowing choices between economic survival and safety. These neighborhoods shouldered a disproportionate amount of the risk of industrialization and urbanization, including the problem of fire. At a time when insurers and engineers made great strides in developing safety for isolated industrial and commercial properties, in...

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