On December 16, 1835, a massive fire erupted in a merchant warehouse in Lower Manhattan, creating one of the most destructive urban disasters in American history. Temperatures had dropped to 17 degrees below zero, accompanied by gale-force winds that whipped flames across hundreds of wooden and brick buildings in the financial center. The city's primary defense—a system of wooden water pipes fed by wells—completely failed as the water inside the mains froze solid.
Desperate volunteer firefighters dragged pump engines to the East River, only to find the harbor frozen over with thick ice, forcing them to chop holes in the ice to draw water that instantly froze inside the leather pump hoses. Compounding the disaster was an extreme shortage of horse-drawn sleds. Deep snowdrifts made wheeled fire carriages useless, and local cartmen demands surged as merchants frantically tried to transport salvaged goods out of the path of the inferno.
With horse sleds in short supply and exorbitant prices demanded by private haulers, millions of dollars in dry goods burned on the snow-covered streets. The disaster spurred New York City to build the Croton Aqueduct system.