I guess the irony was that if it had to happen, this was the best of all possible places and times for it to happen. It was a Saturday, so the streets around Washington Square Park at the bottom of 5th Avenue, and the junction of West 4th Street were not as crowded as they would have been on a regular work day. That meant the rescue efforts were not slowed. The building in which the fire had been sparked was the ten story Asch Building, a modern “fire proof” structure. And the flames were born just after 4:30 p.m., so it was still daylight. Winter darkness would have made the hell that was about to descend on lower Manhattan, just that much worse. It was March 25, 1911.
The first alarm was sent in from Box Number 289 on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just one block East of Washington Square Park. It was just 4:40 p.m. The fire at that moment was less than five minutes old. The alarm sounded at Company #18 on 12th street. At the sound of the bells the three horses on each unit began to move on their own from their stalls. In addition the lead horse in each team had been trained to pull ropes that opened the fire house doors. The fire horses were eager to answer the alarm. Upstairs the firemen, just as eager, leapt to their lockers, pulled on their boots, baggy pants and great coats. By the time they were sliding down the brass pole all the horses were waiting in place beneath the traces, hanging from the ceiling. The traces were dropped onto the team’s backs and the crews slapped on the leather. Within moments the “steamers” (pumpers able to produce 1,000 gallons of water a minute), the hook and ladder wagon (company #20, carrying the tallest extension ladders in the city - another piece of luck), the hose wagon (company #72) and the supply wagons, all with their crews hanging on for dear life, were speeding their way toward Washington Square Park.
In a squat block-sized building at the corner of 10th Avenue/West Side Avenue and Gransevoort Street, the same alarms sounded as well. Here, in the Granesvoort Pumping Station, was the city’s answer to the invention of the skyscraper; five Allis-Chalmers electrical centrifical pumps, able at the flick of a switch to send 300 gallons of water a minute into the pipes. The new High Pressure System was less than five years old and was designed to increase water pressure at each fire hydrant in the district from 25 to at least 90 pounds per square inch. In tests this system had been able to send a stream of water as high as a ten story building. As soon as the alarm sounded on that Saturday afternoon the pumps were turned on. Within three minutes the lines were fully pressurized, before the pumpers had even arrived on the scene . But it was already too late.
It was 4:44 p.m. As the first pumper turned the corner onto Greene Street, the horses heading on their own toward the fire plug, reared and suddenly stopped. The firemen on board were almost thrown to the ground. One fireman dismounted to see what had spooked the horses. He saw a bolt of cloth lying in the street. He moved to pick it up before he realized it was a woman’s body, crumpled on the pavement. 
As he stood in shock a second woman plummeted to the ground with a sickening thud. He saw smoke pouring out of the upper story windows. On the sidewalk and street were the bodies of previous jumpers.
At about the same moment “Hook and Ladder Company # 20” barely made the turn onto Washington Place, when the horses here also reacted with horror to the carnage on the street. Firemen grabbed blankets and nets, designed to catch people leaping out of buildings. But these women, some as young as 13, were dropping from the ninth floor and they ripped right through the fabric and thudded onto the concrete. The rescue nets and blankets were useless.
At about the same moment “Hook and Ladder Company # 20” barely made the turn onto Washington Place, when the horses here also reacted with horror to the carnage on the street. Firemen grabbed blankets and nets, designed to catch people leaping out of buildings. But these women, some as young as 13, were dropping from the ninth floor and they ripped right through the fabric and thudded onto the concrete. The rescue nets and blankets were useless.As Fire Chief Worth arrived firemen were leading the horses and pumpers through the rain of bodies into position. Chief Worth immediately sent in a second alarm. It was 4:48 p.m. As soon as the pumper and ladder units were in position firemen disconnected the horses and led them to Washington Square Park where they could be watered and calmed down.
Immediately upon arrival fireman from Company 18 began to fight their way up against the stream of frantic civilians, pouring down the stairs. The firemen found fire on the 8th floor, and per their training they stopped to fight it. To have gone higher would have put them above the fire, a suicidal position in a building blaze.But one floor above them, the fast majority of victims died, some leaping to their deaths as the flames began to engulf their clothing.
Immediately upon arrival fireman from Company 18 began to fight their way up against the stream of frantic civilians, pouring down the stairs. The firemen found fire on the 8th floor, and per their training they stopped to fight it. To have gone higher would have put them above the fire, a suicidal position in a building blaze.But one floor above them, the fast majority of victims died, some leaping to their deaths as the flames began to engulf their clothing.Outside the ladder companies began to crank their extensions toward the huddled victims on the ninth floor ledges. But the ladders only reached to the seventh floor. The streams of water from the high pressure hoses, even with the aid of pumpers, could only manage to reach the sixth floor. The desperate women and girls, seeing salvation fall short of reaching them, stepped into space, dropping to their deaths rather than suffer the flames licking at their skirts. Some waited too long and fell like flaming meteors. The corpses were pilling up on the street like discarded dolls. Some were so badly burned it was impossible to tell if they were male or female, some so broken by the fall that they could be gathered into bushel baskets.
Firemen were now dragging their high pressure hoses into the building and up the stairwells, hitting the fire directly. At 4:56 p.m. Chief Worth sent in third alarm. At 4:57 p.m. the last body thudded to the pavement on Greene street. By 5:10 p.m., when the fourth alarm was sounded, the fire was well out. As David Von Drehle noted, “The entire blaze, from spark to embers, lasted half an hour.” (“Triangle, the fire that changed America”)
In that brief span of time the fire had killed 141 people, most of them seamstress for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The fireproof building, true to its name, did not burn. Only the furniture and the people inside it did. The building still stands today. It was a day in American history when everything went right and 141 people died in less than 30 minutes.
- 30 -
Four years later, in the spring of 1805, it was Berthier, a Marshal of France now, who meticulously directed the lightning strike of Le Grande Armiee's swing across the Rhine to crush the Austrians at Ulam, capture Vienna, and defeat the combined Austrian and Russian armies at the Emperor of France’s greatest victory, "Austerlitz". In 1806 Berthier oversaw Napoleon’s crushing of Prussia at "Jena", and the frozen bloodbath against the Russians at "Eylau", followed by the decisive victory over the Czar at "Friedland". By the summer of 1807 Napoleon was the master of Europe, referred to by his implacable English foes as "The Beast of Europe". And he would not have been so accomplished if it were not for the efforts of ugly little Berthier. And so it was obvious that when the Emperor sought an afternoon’s diversion, a summer picnic and a hunt in the countryside outside of Paris, it would be Berthier who would organize the entire affair. Surely the man who could plan the conquest of nations could arrange a simple afternoon’s hunt.
They arrived en masse, like a column of revolutionary infantrymen swarming a defensive position. The Emperor went nowhere alone anymore. A regiment of cavalry stood guard. Messengers arrived and were dispatched forth, for an Empire run by one man cannot survive long without assurance that the master is always watching.
Berthier had prepared this too, down to the smallest detail. (That's him in an 'offical' painting above, with the reality edited out of him.) In regard to the hunt, Berthier tried to obtain wild rabbits captured on local farms, but the local peasants had been taxed so heavily to pay for the 'Grande Army' and all that gold braid that they had stripped the local woods and fields of wild game. 
Thirty-thousand Leporidae Oryctolagus cuniculus (European bunny rabbits) charged desperately toward the first human they had seen in 24 hours; humans being the source of all food and warmth in their entire sheltered lives, and the answer to a domesticated rabbit’s hopes and prayers after an endless cold night in the strange, forbidding emptiness of a field; the Emperor Napoleon Bonapart.
Where they afflicted? Where they part of a devilish English plot to murder him? Napoleon had no way of knowing, and little time to decide. But even if the Emperor suspected the actual cause behind the stamped of cottontails, hunting is not a sport when the prey rush you and offer themselves up to be butchered en masse. The servants thrashed at the rabbits with whips, the ambassadors and royalty snickered behind their lace cuffs and the generals and Marshals of France threw their gold braid between the homesick bunnies and their Emperor. But in the end Napoleon was forced to retreat to his royal coach, and then to withdraw back within the walls of his palace, his afternoon sport spoiled. It was prescience of the night after Waterloo, of the snowy road home from Moscow, of the voyage to exile on Elba and Helena. At a time when no force could stand up to the 'Beast of Europe', Napoleon had been defeated by an army of bunny rabbits. Vive la Peter Cottontail!
It was at this point in the evolution of the idea that chance intervened, in the form of a love sick 22 year old woman in far off Bristol, England. On May 8, 1885 Miss Sara Ann Henley received a note from her boyfriend breaking off their engagement. In a fit of pique Miss Henley walked half way across the Clifton Suspension Bridge, above the Avon River Gorge, and threw herself off. As she plummeted the 245 feet toward oblivion her crinolined petticoats caught the air like a parachute and slowed her descent. Luckily she landed in shallow waters along the shore, where her landing was softened by thick forgiving mud. She was badly injured, but she lived. Her extraordinary survival made all of the English papers, and was picked up and republished in America.
A week after Miss Henley’s great fall the New York police got word that ‘Professor’ Odlum had been inspired to give the Brooklyn bridge another “go”. They alerted the toll collectors, and on Sunday afternoon, May 19, 1885 (ten days after Miss Henley’s plunge) a collector reported a suspicious cab lingering on the bridge. Officers found it parked against the outside rail half way across the span. But it was a decoy. While they were searching the cab, two wagons further back "Professor" Odlum leapt from beneath a covered flatbed wearing a swimsuit emblazoned with his name, clambered over the railing and before the cops could reach him, threw him self into space.
Imagine Robert Odlum’s surprise when he discovered that the cops had been right. He entered the water feet first (as was the accepted diving position at the time) and shattered every bone in his frame from heel to skull. He was pulled from the river unconscious and died a half hour later. His friends shipped his body home, and Robert’s sister came to town ten days later to demand that the coroner explain what had become of her brother’s liver and heart. She never got a satisfactory answer, but my guess is they had both been reduced to jelly by the impact. A little math shows that “Professor” Odlum hit the water going sixty-three and a half miles an hour. At that speed water is as fluid as cold concrete.
But it was Robert Odlum’s tragic foolishness that was the catalyst for the Irish hero of our bad idea. He was 23 years old by this time making his living as a newsboy and a bookie amongst the denizens of the Bowery. Like a certain actress he had worked with, Steve Brodie needed to escape the chorus, except in his case the chorus was a carcophony of poverty. The story that he later told was that a friend, James Brennan, had dared him on a $100 bet that he would not jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, and survive. But I doubt that Mr. Brennan had ever seen $100 in his life.
Brodie parleyed his 15 minutes of fame into his own bar, with a little theatre in the rear where he re-enacted his alledged dramatic plunge into the East River several times a week for the tourists. In 1891 promoters built a Broadway melodrama (“Mad Money”) around his dive and another in 1894, (“On the Bowery”).
In 1895 Mrs. Clara McArthur, married to a disabled railroad worker and mother to a young daughter, jumped off the bridge at 3:30 in the morning. She was seeking a share of Steve Brodies’ pot of gold for her destitute family. The desperate Clara was wrapped in an American flag. She had water-wings strapped under her arms and a punching bag tied to her back to keep her afloat after landing. Her socks were filled with sand to keep her feet below her head (again the accepted best attitude to enter the water). But she hit the water on her side, spreading the impact over the length of her body. Still, the impact ripped the water wings under her arms, to shreds. She struggled to the surface but the punching bag kept flipping her over, onto her face, and the socks kept pulling her down. Clara finally passed out, face down in the water.
Steve Brodie is not counted as one of those ten. He was always an agreable fellow. If he had money, his friends and family shared in it. He gave generously to charity his entire life. But it is extremely doubtful that he actually made the jump. He tried to extend his fame by claiming to have lepted off a railroad bridge in upstate New York, and later claiming to have gone over Niagara Falls wrapped in inner tubes and metal bumpers. The Niagara stunt, real or not, almost killed him. He settled in Buffalo, New York, and operated a bar there for a few years before his asthma forced him to move to San Antonio, Texas, where he died in 1901 of complications of diabetes. Steve Brodie was all of 38 years old. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, in Woodside, Queens, New York. Thankfully the idea of jumping from the bridge for fame and fortune died with him.
The longest living survivor of all these daredevils was the accidental one. Sara Ann Henley (below), the woman who tried to commit suicide in 1885 by jumping 240 feet off the Clifton Suspension bridge, finally earned her angel’s wings in 1948. She was 84 years old, married but with no children, perhaps because of injuries sustained in her fall into the Avon River Gorge. Such feats, for fame or to protest fortune, are never good ideas.
