NEW YORK’S LATEST HOLOCAUST.
ONCE again the Bowery lodginghouse has come to the front as a firetrap, and the city’s list of victims who have met their death by fire has been swelled by seven lives, all of which might have been saved had the proper precautions been taken by those who are charged with the responsibility of seeing that the building was sufficiently protected against fire and sufficiently equipped with means of escape from the flames when once they had started. The scene of the disaster was a seven-story lodging house, in Manhattan, known as the Garfield, 44-48 New Bowery. It contained 132 small bedrooms, of which ninety were occupied last Saturday night. As a fire, the blaze did not amount to much, and the firemen had it under in a very short time. The house,it is claimed was fitted with fire alarm bells in every room, and from the windows the conventional Jacob’s ladder fire escapes, sufficient in the eyes of the law to cover the terms of the ordinance, were all in evidence. But all these precautions were in vain, and those who were not burned to death were suffocated in their rooms. The question still remains: Why was such a building ever licensed by the city authorities as a lodginghouse? One glance at the house externally would convince even the veriest tyro that it was a moral impossibility for all its inhabitants to escape during a midnight or early morning fire Its windows look out, not upon commodious fire escapes, easy of descent by the oldest and feeblest, but upon narrow iron straight up-and-down ladders, with slender rungs, and no guards on either side—the mere look from one down to the street being enough to cause dizziness, and their construction rendering it impossible for even a few, when using them, to make any speed in their descent. What wonder,then,that, when 132 or more panic-stricken persons, only half awake, are routed out of their beds, they are unable to reach the ground by means of those legalized burlesques upon fire escapes? The marvel would be that any should escape—that they did so was due to the noble efforts of the firemen and the police. Internally the arrangements were as bud as they could be. The cubicles which did duty for bedrooms were separated, not by substantial brick walls running up the whole way from the foundations, but by flimsy partitions—each one a ready means of spreading a fire. The ceilings, old and thin, invited the flames to consume them; the rickety stairs, the narrow, winding passages—each one a funnel through which flames would sweep unrestrained; the windows of the second floor opening out upon combustible material in the way of a porch into the saloon below; the rear, a mere trap, which, to those who should reach it, if the whole house were well alight, offered but the one choice—that of being roasted to death or being suffocated in their tracks—how could either the building or fire department inspectors pass such a place as one in every way fit for human beings to sleep in? Yet the Garfield was actually a much less bad type of lodginghouse than scores of tenement and lodginghouses in this city—the existence of which is apparently more than winked at by the municipal authorities. But why should such deathtraps be so winked at? Can it be that the possession of a saloon license insures to its possession the license also to stow away lodgers as sheep are penned in a pinfold, or cattle in the hold of a ship? It looks like it, and all the more that not long ago a license as a nonliquor-selling hotel was refused to the Episcopal Church Temperance association, when its management desired to open in the Bowery a lodginghouse in every way palatial, when compared with the New Bowery building, on the pretence that it did not in every way comply with the provisions of the city’s building code and was not sufficiently safeguarded agaiust fire.ߞBut, then, no liquor was to be sold on the premises, nor would there be any need of “seeing” “pantatas” and so of averting police raids, as the house was to be run on strictly decent principles! The recent frequency of such fatal fires in this city points its own moral. If they took place in the East End of London or in the crowded districts of Soho or Seven Dials,no end of comparisons would be made— and these not favorable to the British metropolis and its fire brigade But, when they take place in the modern metropolis of the New World, with the exception of one newspaper, not one word is read of reprobation of a system which allows such a state of things to exist. The jewel, consistency, is conspicuous by its absence. Would it not be well to invite its reappearance?
