Daniel Levy: The Great Fire of New York (1835)

There is nowhere on earth quite like New York City. In this episode the writer and journalist Daniel Levy takes us back to the early nineteenth-century and to a dramatic, catalytic moment in his home town’s development: the Great Fire of 1835.

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‘It is only necessary to sit down with a minute map of the country,’ observed the novelist James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, ‘to perceive at a glance, that Nature herself has intended the island of Manhattan for the site of one of the greatest commercial towns in the world.’

Fenimore Cooper was writing as New York entered a crucial moment in its development. It was a time, as Daniel Levy explains, when New York was beginning its magical transformation from being a large unruly community to being a large unruly metropolis. One catalytic event that happened during this time was the Great Fire of 1835.

A fierce conflagration that destroyed almost 700 houses and could be seen from great distances, the fire was a powerfully destructive force. But it also ushered in a new phase in New York’s history, as it finally broke out of its old boundaries on the southern rim of Manhattan Island and started to grow.

As ever, there is much more about this episode on our website: tttpodcast.com

Daniel Levy’s book, Manhattan Phoenix is recently published by Oxford University Press.

Show notes

Scene One: May 12, 1835, 10 am at a church on Houston St. Lewis Tappan and others of the American Anti-Slavery Society set off the Postal campaign.

Scene Two: Late in the day October 5, 1835, 15 year old George Templeton Strong made his first entry in his diary, a journal he would write in until his death in 1875.

Scene Three: December 16, 1835 9pm. The start of the Great Fire.

Memento: One of the old NYC wooden water pipes.

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Daniel Levy

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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