With help from strong winds, flames leaped from shops to warehouses to the majestic Merchants Exchange (below, in a 1909 illustration).
“The city’s undermanned volunteer fire brigades rushed to the scene, but what little water could be pumped from the nearby hydrants turned to ice in the frigid night air, and the crews-exhausted from fighting a blaze the night before-were soon completely overwhelmed,” wrote Ric Burns and James Sanders in New York: An Illustrated History. Flames broke out inside a warehouse on Pearl Street, the center of New York’s dry-goods district. It started on the frigid night of December 16. Posted in Brooklyn, Chelsea, Holiday traditions, Maps, Transit | 4 Comments » Tags: country roads Colonial New York City, Love Lane Brooklyn, Love Lane Chelsea, old maps of New York City, old streets of New York, Randel Survey Map, streets of old Chelsea This historic alley has a romantic back story. Luckily Brooklyn didn’t obliterate their Love Lane. “Before the war, Love Lane was popular route for buggyride courtships, highlighted with a romantic trip along the Hudson River that ran along what is now Tenth Avenue,” states the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club website. Love Lane is memorialized in old city history guides and newspaper articles as a shaded street that “figures romantically in the early history of New York,” according to a 1920 New York Times article. It then curved through 22nd to 23rd Street, meandering over to Tenth Avenue and hugging the water line. This 18th century country road seems to have started at Broadway (then called Bloomingdale Road) and followed a path along 21st Street through today’s Chelsea.īased on old maps ( like the one at left or below, from the Randel Survey) and descriptions, it appears to have cut across a long-defunct thoroughfare known as Fitz Roy Road. Wouldn’t it be sweet to live on a Manhattan street called Love Lane? Too bad we’re at least 200 years too late.